Peter Bogdanovich's first film, shot in Los Angeles, is a mixture of homage to the cinema (a Bogdanovich preoccupation) with a timely, violent story of random murder. Targets begins in a Sunset Strip screening room, where Byron Orlok (Boris Karloff), monster movie star, gives his film crew a fright by announcing his retirement from motion pictures. It ends in an L.A. drive-in theater, where Orlok is due to make a personal appearance. In the meantime, a kid named Bobby (Tim O'Kelly) has gone berserk, killed his family and shot at random from a San Diego Freeway overpass, killing several others. Now Bobby is off to the drive-in movies, for more target practice.
A touching paean to Boris Karloff (who was 80 at the time) by the enfant terrible Bogdanovich, Targets has an interesting genesis. James Monaco tells the story:
“Bogdanovich had worked on a couple of films for Roger Corman and was given his first chance to direct a film because Corman was the possessor of: (a) extra footage from a film Boris Karloff had made for him called The Terror; and (b) two days Karloff still owed him on the contract for that picture.... Bogdanovich came up with an ingenious way to integrate Karloff into the film he wanted to make and, as it turned out, used only a few minutes of The Terror....”