Peter Bogdanovich's first film, a low-budget blast from the Roger Corman canon, is a mixture of homage to cinema (a Bogdanovich preoccupation) and a still timely Vietnam-era story of random murder on the streets of Los Angeles. 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 seems his bloody ouvre can't compete with the gore of real life, and he's giving up in horror. Targets ends in an L.A. drive-in theater, where Orlok is due to make a personal appearance. In the meantime, a clean-cut kid, a Vietnam vet named Bobby (Tim O'Kelly) has gone berserk, killed his family, and picked off people at random from a San Diego Freeway overpass. Now, Bobby is off to the drive-in movies, for more target practice. Bogdanovich makes the equation between film (shooting) and guns (shooting) in the film's second half, which is an excruciating ballet of camera and gun sights focusing on innocent targets and thoroughly implicating us, the viewers, in Bobby's rampage. (A prologue advocating gun control was added to most prints of the film following Robert Kennedy's assassination that same year.)