Bogdanovich's first “homage to cinema” is a 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 imminent retirement from pictures. It seems his bloody oeuvre can't compete with the gore of real life. Targets ends in an L.A. drive-in theater where Orlok is due to make a personal appearance. In the meantime, a clean-cut Vietnam vet named Bobby has gone berserk, killed his family, and picked off random victims from a San Diego Freeway overpass. Now Bobby is off to the drive-in movies, for more target practice-but he can't separate image from actuality. Bogdanovich makes the equation between film (shooting) and guns (shooting) in an excruciating ballet of camera and gun sights focusing on innocent targets and thoroughly implicating the viewer in Bobby's rampage.