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 Very Scary;
There's a New Kind of
Monster in Town
Targets
|
| [This page combines my reviews
of this film done for Amazon
and also for the Internet Movie Database] |
[IMDB Review, posted 13 July
2000]
Click Here to go to the
IMDB page for Targets |
This
is a film that clearly illustrates what can be
done with very little money, if the director
and writers are creative enough and also lucky
enough to get a star of Boris Karloff's
charisma and presence.
Karloff only appears here because he owed Roger Corman* about
three days shooting time on his latest
contract; using him in a secondary but crucial
role, Bogdanovich gives a true resonance and
frisson to the film that might not have been
there with a lesser light in the role of the
old-time bogeyman who knows that he's not
nearly as frightening as the Real World.
Casting Karloff also solved the problem of the
movie-within-the movie -- outtakes from "The
Terror" (watch for Jack Nicholson).
This is not a film about gun control (though
some prints have a prolog that makes it sound
that way), nor is it really a film about a
killer (except as he represents the
frightening world around us that we cannot
control but must deal with) -- this is a film
about destinies and inevitability. We are
fated, it seems to say -- we all die, but some
deaths are more random than others and some
confrontations are inevitable before the end.
Bogdanovich plays cleverly with this idea of
fate and inevitability, as the killer and
Byron Orlok (Karloff) cross paths once or
twice without really knowing it before the
final conflict is forced upon them. One of the
cleverer ways he uses to make this point is
Orlok's recounting, in that beautiful, deep,
velvety, slightly-lisping voice that is so
archetypal, of "The Appointment in Samarra", a
fable that stresses that however much we
attempt to escape our fate, often that much
more we bring it to its climax.
An important point that Bogdanovich
understood, which the makers of "Two Minute
Warning", another sniper film, apparently did
not, is that the best way to portray the true
terror of this story is to focus tightly on
the killer, leaving his victims (for the most
part -- one particularly scarifying sequence
in the drive-in at the end that shows us in
tight sharp focus the results of his
marksmanship serves to emphasise the point)
nothing but distant, anonymous ... Targets.
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For other books about Roger Corman, click [here] and [here]. |
{Amazon Review, posted 19
January 2001; five stars}
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An Underestimated
National Resource
This film is one of i-don't-know-how-many in
all that clearly reveals the existence of a
great national resource that most people
aren't even aware exists -- Producer/Director
Roger Corman!
How many illustrious careers began making
cheapie films for Corman?
Well, Bogdanovich here, Coppola on "Dementia
13"...
More recently, Joe Dante ("Gremlins") and
Allan Arkush ("Rock 'n' Roll High School"),
the late Paul Bartel ("Eating Raoul") and
James Cameron ("Aliens", "Terminator", "True
Lies") have started out working for Corman.
The earliest legitimate film appearances by
Sylvester Stallone that i know of are in
Corman films...
Bogdanovich had an idea for a new kind of
horror film. Corman had three days of shooting
time that Boris Karloff owed him.
The result is a quiet but disturbing film that
circles inevitably around and around to a
final confrontation.
Karloff's portrayal of, essentially, himself,
is wonderful; you can see the big, gentle and
genuinely funny man who was behind so many of
the great scary movies.
((Incidentally, while it would be nice to
think of this as Karloff's "Shootist" -- a
last, a final, valedictory film to
perfectly end his career, as that film
ended and summed up John Wayne's -- it is,
unfortunately not true; he made three
awful US/Mexican films after "Targets"
[One of them is "The Crimson Cult", i
don't remember the others]. Most Karloff
fans sort of overlook those and credit
this as his final "real" film...)) |
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