Targets 1968 123movies

Watch: Targets 1968 123movies, Full Movie Online – Byron Orlok is an old horror-movie star who feels that he is an anachronism. Compared to real-life violence, his films are tame. Meanwhile, Bobby Thompson goes on a killing spree….
Plot: The fate of a washed-up horror actor intersects with a psychotic sniper on a killing spree.
Smart Tags: #drive_in #gun #rifle #sniper #serial_killer #gun_shop #independent_film #psychopath #psychopathic_killer #death_of_wife #violence #damsel_in_distress #drive_in_theatre #los_angeles_california #surprise_announcement #cigarette_smoking #mustang_convertible #weapons_arsenal #target_practice #room_service #45_calibre_pistol

Find Alternative – Targets 1968, Streaming Links:

123movies | FMmovies | Putlocker | GoMovies | SolarMovie | Soap2day

Ratings:

	7.3/10 Votes: 10,081
	90% | RottenTomatoes
	N/A | MetaCritic
	N/A Votes: 150 Popularity: 7.327 | TMDB

Reviews:

Roger Corman offered to produce (without credit) whatever film first time director Peter Bogdanovich wanted to make under two conditions: He had to cast Boris Karloff, who owed Corman two days work; and to keep the cost down, he had to pad the running time with footage from an earlier Karloff film. The result was TARGETS (1968), which proved to be too topical for many theaters to touch when it initially appeared. That’s a shame, because it provided Karloff with an A-level role as the sun set on his life and career. Bogdanovich tells parallel stories which converge at the finale: One involves a young man who turns to bloodshed when he feels that he has nothing ahead of him; the other revolves around an aged film star who believes that everything is behind him. Timely when released because of the social climate; timely now because of the politically charged debate over gun control; and ultimately – thanks to the presence of the great Karloff – timeless.

**_As relevant today as it was when it was made_**

An aged horror icon (Boris Karloff) wants to retire because he’s weary of the biz and thinks modern life has become more horrifying than his old-fashioned movies. But a director/writer (Peter Bogdanovich) encourages him to read an atypical script or, at least, attend a promotional appearance at a drive-in, which is showing his latest movie, “The Terror.” Unfortunately, a young ordinary man (Tim O’Kelly) has snapped and is on a killing spree with the drive-in being his final shooting range.

“Targets” (1968) is a minor cult masterpiece, a self-conscious postmodernist piece inspired by the “Texas Tower Sniper” from August 1, 1966, who killed 14 people and wounded 31 others at the University of Texas at Austin. Bobby (O’Kelly) is patterned after the lunatic murderer with the setting simply switched to the San Fernando Valley in SoCal.

I took the flick as a bleak commentary on the way it simply is in America rather than a criticism of the 2nd Amendment. After all, outlawing alcohol during Prohibition didn’t stop people from selling & purchasing booze and neither have drug laws in the modern day stopped people from selling & buying illegal drugs. Evil doesn’t exist in a gun, knife, club or rock, but in the hearts of people bent on taking innocent lives for their own evil purposes.

Plus, as clichéd as it may sound, the quickest way to stop an evil person with a gun is by a good person with a gun (certainly not an elderly man with a cane). A good recent example is the case in Charleston, West Virginia, on May 25, 2022, where a brave woman shot an active shooter dead before he was able to murder anyone gathered at an apartment complex. Dissolving the 2nd Amendment would only prevent law-abiding citizens from buying/owning firearms; it wouldn’t prevent wackos intent on bloodshed from purchasing firearms on the black market.

To support this, Bobby panics at the climax precisely because some male viewers at the drive-in have grabbed their legal guns to take care of the sniper. Keep in mind that producer Roger Corman sold the movie to Paramount rather than release it through AIP. After the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Bobby Kennedy the studio released only six prints and prefaced the flick with a statement advocating gun control. Director Bogdanovich had zero to do with this.

“Targets” works as an interesting psychological study: What is it that causes Bobby to ‘snap’ and ruin his life by going on a crazed killing spree? His respectable-yet-intimidating father has properly trained him on firearm safety, but he has also inadvertently made his son a frustrated weakling — a bomb just waiting to go off. The disease of legalism is all over his parent’s household, where the young couple resides. Look at the clues.

This was one of Karloff’s last movies. He passed away 5.5 months after its release at the age of 81. Thankfully, he plays an interesting protagonist, a hero even, rather than some cheesy boogeyman for the millionth time. Plus I enjoyed the levity provided by his character and Bogdanovich’s, which counterbalances the stark, depressing vacancy of the rest of the story.

Really, the flick is about the thin line between reality and art, the relationship between real-life and films. For instance, the killer loading his rifle is paralleled with the projectionist loading his projector at the drive-in. Also, the slayer confuses the old man intently moving toward him with the actor’s character on the big screen. It’s equally about the decline of morals and banalization of life in the modern day, particularly America and Western Culture, where we’ve lost our spiritual compass and sense of purpose.

Lastly, the easy access to firearms can culminate in deadly expression of pent-up frustration and anger, which is just below the surface in some otherwise perfectly normal people. Again, the most effective way to stop ’em with the least amount of bloodshed is a good person with a gun, who’s on the scene. ’Nuff said.

The film runs 1 hour, 29 minutes, and was shot in Los Angeles, including Van Nuys, Hollywood, West Hollywood and Reseda.

GRADE: B

A true hidden gem, and a fitting exit for the legendary Boris Karloff
Ageing horror actor Byron Orlock (Boris Karloff) has just finished what will be his final film. The campy nature of the horror films he stars in, and the decline in moral society leads him to believe that horror films are no longer scary, especially when compared with what is happening in the real world. Young director Sammy Michaels (Peter Bogdanovich) has just written a great script especially for Orlock, and tries to persuade him to re-think his retirement plans on the build-up to Orlock’s final public appearance at a drive-in for his new movie The Terror. Meanwhile, suburban husband and gun-obsessive Bobby Thompson (Tim O’Kelly) is planning a massacre using his sniper rifle, starting with his wife and family.

As usual when it comes to Roger Corman productions, the story behind the film is just as interesting (often more so) as the film itself. Karloff apparently owed Corman a couple of days work, so he was handed to Corman protégé Peter Bogdanovich, and told him to make whatever film he liked – as long as it was cheap, quick, included footage of his film The Terror (1963), and drew on the recent Charles Whitman killings. So, with the help of screenwriter Samuel Fuller, Bogdanovich crafted an intelligent, shocking, and extremely interesting film that what way ahead of its time.

Targets is many things. On one hand it is a warm love-letter to the legendary actors of old. In one scene, Michaels enters Orlock’s hotel room, them both being drunk, and watch the end of Howard Hawks’ The Criminal Code (1931), which starred a younger Boris Karloff. They briefly discuss the genius of Hawks and Michaels comments on what a fine screen presence Orlock (really Karloff) was, and still is. It is also a first-rate thriller. Tim O’Kelly is very effective as the clean-cut, all-American boy, who is becoming increasingly shaken about the person he finds himself becoming. In real-life, Whitman was found to have an aggressive brain tumour that was believed to be the cause of the sudden killing spree. The violence, though not gratuitous or exploitative, is shocking and nasty. The murder scenes are shot with a slow and detailed precision that are scary given the real-life occurrences.

Most interestingly, the film is a commentary on the generation gap, in both society and in cinema. Michaels states that “all the great films have already been made.” Of course, this is not true – America was about to enter its true golden age, when the likes of Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Dennis Hopper, Francis Ford Coppola, Michael Cimino, and Bogdanovich himself shook Hollywood to its core. But Michaels is reflecting Orlock’s fear of the new. Orlock is retiring because “it’s a young person’s world,” and he feels he no longer has his place. The film builds up to the inevitable meeting of Orlock and Thompson – the old vs. the new, if you will.

Targets is quite hard to sum up. It is genuinely a hidden gem, and a true original that should be seen by anyone interested in cinema. Karloff would sadly pass away a year after this film was released, and he gives what is possibly his finest career performance. He has no scary make-up or sets to drown him out. He is simply an old man, walking stick and all. Although he made a couple more films after this, Targets seems his true and fitting exit from cinema. This is close to an ‘A’-movie that I’ve seen a B-movie get, and again proves that Roger Corman was a true cinema genius.

www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

Peter Bogdanovich’s debut is his greatest film!
This small in budget, huge in talent picture had the terrible timing of being completed before, but released after Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy Sr. were assassinated. The toll those two events had in 1968 almost guaranteed “Targets” would never be seen by audiences that could watch Tim O’Kelly and keep his character in mind as a Charles Whitman figure rather than a politically motivated gunman. Bogdanovich’s first directing turn also marked the swan song of Boris Karloff. The two of them together were a dynamite pairing and it’s a shame we didn’t get more from this movie loving duo.

Clips from Roger Corman’s “The Terror” (with Karloff and a really young Jack Nicholson) are strategically inserted, as Boris plays an actor who’s synonymous with big screen terror. And as his career is winding down, the changes frightening him in society are not costumes, on the lot sets and ghoulish cosmetics, but real human monsters who destroy any remaining sense of safety in the world with high powered rifles and other firearms. His Byron Orlok is an old man who knows his time is short and makes the most of each day he continues to live. Bogdanovich’s Sammy is in awe of the legend, while most of the industry hustlers Byron has to deal with are only interested in the hype and money.

Enter Tim O’Kelly and his family. The parents are salt of the earth types and Tim’s wife is his rock. Then why does this clean cut young man in his twenties during the era of the love generation look and feel so out of step with modern life? We’ll never really know. Those mass murderers in the making only reveal certain key clues when it’s too late to stop their plans.

Sam Fuller provided help, whipping the script into shape, as the director acknowledges in his commentary. It’s better that those wanting to see this smaller, quiet film not know all of it’s plot. Calling a story with much gunfire “quiet” is peculiar, but the sound editing of Verna Fields is the unsung hero of “Targets”, where the bursts of lethal noise alternate with a serene soundtrack stripped down to not too much era music (Bogdanovich had a handful of obscure 60’s tunes to sparingly use) and, thankfully, none of the din cluttering most 21st century movies, letting us hear the full tones of each person’s voice sans cranked up score and effects.

“Targets” is a terrific and overlooked time capsule from an era before school shootings were an almost weekly event in the news and when there seemed to be a solution for ending violence in our future. It’s an almost quaint trip back inside a cautious sense of optimism we’ll not share again.

Other Information:

Original Language en
Runtime 1 hr 30 min (90 min)
Budget 130000
Revenue 0
Status Released
Rated R
Genre Crime, Drama, Thriller
Director Peter Bogdanovich
Writer Peter Bogdanovich, Polly Platt, Samuel Fuller
Actors Tim O’Kelly, Boris Karloff, Arthur Peterson
Country United States
Awards 1 win
Production Company N/A
Website N/A

Technical Information:

Sound Mix Mono
Aspect Ratio 1.85 : 1
Camera N/A
Laboratory Pathé Laboratory, USA (color by) (as Pathé)
Film Length 2,485 m (1970) (Finland)
Negative Format 35 mm
Cinematographic Process Spherical
Printed Film Format 35 mm