Targets

While it lacks the style and polish of the films that come after it, Peter Bogdanovich’s debut film, Targets (1968), is a first feature of note — one that still packs a punch (maybe a punch that hits even harder in contemporary times). Its history is part of movie legend, but it’s worth remembering that it all came about because Boris Karloff owed Roger Corman a couple of days. Corman gave those days to Bogdanovich — along with 20 minutes of his 1963 film The Terror — and let the critic-turned-director make what he wanted. Karloff ended up working five days — three of them for free. So Bogdanovich — along with his then-wife Polly Platt and with some uncredited assistance from Sam Fuller — cooked up a story. From this, he wrote a screenplay and made a film that was so good that Corman let him sell it to Paramount for a more prestigious release than Corman and independent studio American International Pictures could offer. It was essentially guerrilla filmmaking — working quickly and without permits — and it delivered a whole different kind of chilling. [...] It goes without saying that real life events have caught up with Bogdanovich’s film, giving it a resonance no one could have imagined in 1968 — and certainly one no one could have wished for. However, it’s impossible to watch Bogdanovich’s film today without seeing alarming parallels in the images of an unsuspecting, even uncomprehending, audience being fired upon from the screen. [These excerpts were drawn from a review by Ken Hanke on Dec. 24, 2013. Ken's full review is available online at mountainx.com.] The Hendersonville Film Society will show Targets, on Sunday Sept. 11, at 2 p.m. in the Smoky Mountain Theater at Lake Pointe Landing Retirement Community, 333 Thompson St., Hendersonville.