Peter Bogdanovich produced, directed, edited and wrote the screenplay to TARGETS. The film has a curious and dichotomous quality to it. On one hand Bogdanovich handled the sniper (a very clean-cut Tim O'Kelly) in a very real, threatening and unprecedented way for its time. O'Kelly looks so much like the all-American kid from next door that he is all the more frightening making the film very unsettling. O'Kelly munches on a sandwich and guzzles down soda in-between his targets. Moreover the sniper is ferreted out by a famous horror film idol (Boris Karloff) from the golden age of Hollywood. The confrontation comes at a drive-in theatre of all places in an unusual climax. The film is suspenseful and alluring. Once you start watching it you're hooked. Is there a message to this film? Perhaps there is. The finale is almost pure hokum, but perhaps that is the point. Leave the killings, the violence and horror up on the screen. Don't let it escape into the real world. Get your jollies at the movies then drive home and lead a normal life. Perhaps that was true 30 years ago.
A FINAL APPEARANCE, A NEW BEGINNING, and MASS MURDER
'Targets' is wonderful movie which introduces a new Directing talent, Peter Bagdonovich, and also is the setting for the final appearance of Horror movie giant Boris Karloff. The movie is good although the weak plot. The cinematography is cheap but thats what makes it good. The film is about a young "All American Boy" who becomes a mass murderer by Sniping people at a drive in Theatre which is home to a premire of Boris Karloff's final movie. THe image of the sniper is compied after Charles Whitman, the individual who killed 14 people from the University of Texas Tower in Austin. The sets are cheap but the directing skill of Bagdonovich makes everything work well. See Targets for an interesting look at Karloff's final performance plus a wonderful Independant Film.
a grand exit (well cose to an exit)
corman wows here and reminds us that we really lost a very good director when he decided to devote all of his time to producing. regardless, forget those last, depressing mexican horror quickies that karloff wheezed his poor dying self through. keep this as his bow. it's a nice summation of a glorious career.
This 1966 masterpiece by Michelangelo Antonioni (The Passenger) is set in the heady atmosphere of Swinging London, and stars David Hemmings as an unsmiling fashion photographer hooked on ephemeral meaning attached to anything: art, sex, work, relationships, drugs, events. When a real mystery falls into his lap, he probes the evidence for some reliable truth, but finds it hard to reckon with. Vanessa Redgrave plays an enigmatic woman whose desperation to cover something up only seems like one more phenomenon in Hemmings's disinterested purview. This is one of the key films of the decade, and still an unsettling and lasting experience. --Tom KeoghMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Vanessa Redgrave - David Hemmings Director(s): Michelangelo Antonioni DVD Release Date: Released the 17 February 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Ranking No. 21 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest American films, this 1940 classic is a bit dated in its noble sentimentality, but it remains a luminous example of Hollywood classicism from the peerless director of mythic Americana, John Ford. Adapted by Nunnally Johnson from John Steinbeck's classic novel, the film tells a simple story about Oklahoma farmers leaving the depression-era dustbowl for the promised land of California, but it's the story's emotional resonance and theme of human perseverance that makes the movie so richly and timelessly rewarding. It's all about the humble Joad family's cross-country trek to escape the economic devastation of their ruined farmland, beginning when Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) returns from a four-year prison term to discover... More Info about this DVD Director(s): John Ford DVD Release Date: Released the 06 April 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Samuel Fuller's "Pickup on South Street" is easily one of his better films and as cynical and tough as crime dramas got in the 50's. Richard Widmark is excellent as a cocky pickpocket who swipes the wallet of sexy Jean Peters that contains microfilm of government secrets to be delivered to a Communist agency. Peters is unaware of the Communist angle and is only doing a "job" for her slimy ex-boyfriend Richard Kiley (who's also excellent). Getting mixed up in the mess to get back the microfilm is street peddler/police informant Thelma Ritter who sells information to whoever wants to buy it. The film is gritty and unsentimental and none of the characters are saints. New York City is depicted as a tough place to survive especially on the dirty waterfront where Skip McCoy (Widmark) lives and... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Richard Widmark - Jean Peters Director(s): Samuel Fuller DVD Release Date: Released the 17 February 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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After the triumph of Chinatown, Roman Polanski's The Tenant marked an unsettling return to the horrifying psychodrama of Repulsion and Rosemary's Baby. As in those previous films, Polanski explores a descent into madness with subtle, deliberate pacing and keen attention to accumulating details. Cannily casting himself in the title role, Polanski plays the mild-mannered occupant of a Parisian flat previously rented by a woman who committed suicide by leaping from her upper-floor balcony. The woman's leftover belongings and the harsh attitudes of disapproving neighbors (including Melvin Douglas and Shelley Winters) begin to grate on the new tenant's psyche; his paranoia shifts from simmering anxiety to full-blown psychosis, until fate itself seems to run in a... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Roman Polanski - Isabelle Adjani - Melvyn Douglas Director(s): Roman Polanski DVD Release Date: Released the 01 July 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The most famous and sublime treatment of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, John Ford's My Darling Clementine is by any measure one of the most classically perfect Westerns ever made. Henry Fonda plays a hard, serious Wyatt Earp leading a cattle drive west with his brothers when a stopover in the wild town of Tombstone ends in the murder of his youngest brother. Wyatt takes up the badge he had turned down earlier and tames the wide-open town with his brothers (Ward Bond and Tim Holt), all the while waiting for the wild Clantons (led by Walter Brennan's ruthless Old Man Clanton) to make a mistake. Victor Mature delivers perhaps his finest performance as the tubercular gambler Doc Holliday, an alcoholic Eastern doctor escaping civilization in the Wild West. Ford takes great liberties... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Henry Fonda - Linda Darnell Director(s): John Ford DVD Release Date: Released the 06 January 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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