Popular reviews

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  Review by Josh Lewis ★★★★★ 3

  Out with the old and in with the new. A Hollywood actor from the era where horror movies were a tall man telling spooky stories in a gothic castle lives not just long enough to see the era where a lone gunman can occupy a tower for a few hours and kill dozens of people for no reason but also the exploitation movies we'd make and sell out of those fears. "What an ugly town this has become." And an even nastier business.

  Full discussion on episode 165 of my podcast SLEAZOIDS.

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  Review by Will Menaker ★★★★★ 13

  Holy shit Tarantino stole everything in OUATIH from this movie lol.

  I don't say this as a knock on QT, but goddamn this movie was amazing. Boris Karloff is so fucking good, totally charming and poignant, essentially playing himself in what would be his last serious role, as a legendary horror actor feeling out of place in the "New" Hollywood and looking to retire as over the course of two days in LA, he careens toward a random and terrifying collision with a mass shooter. A disturbingly prescient portrayal of American mass murder and the entertainment industry. A+

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  Review by matt lynch ★★★★

  "Hey. You're Boris fuckin' Karloff. Don't you forget it."

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  Review by demi adejuyigbe ★★★★ 10

  One of my weirdest fears has always been that if I am driving and someone passes me with their windows down or rolling down, I am going to be suddenly shot. I don't like driving with the windows down because it feels like it somehow exposes me to that even quicker. Sometimes when I sit by big windows, I'm afraid that either by the entropic nature of the universe or as a targeted assassination (????) a bullet will hit me. I don't know the logic of this and I don't know the source of this fear, but it's been with me for ages. Maybe because I was raised in Texas, where in 1966, only two years prior to this movie,…

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  Review by SilentDawn ★★★★½ 9

  90

  The dual-structure of Targets is integral to understanding how relevant it is. One half is a study of 'Byron Orlock', played with melancholy and poise by Boris Karloff: a horror titan who suddenly yearns to retire as he notices the world passing by without him. The other? A study of a young man who becomes a sniper terrorist, for reasons we aren't told about. The audience just has to sit and watch, observing his normalcy and monstrosity in the same breath. How the two halves connect is not to be spoiled by me, but it reflects ideas that are still in the conversation today: mass shootings, the death (and the fundamental joys) of cinema, the old making the way…

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  Review by sydney ★★★★★ 2

  TARGETS is gigantic. Triple feature this with BLOW OUT and THE PARALLAX VIEW and you've got a perfectly disgusting portrait of cynical America, so why does nobody talk about this movie? I only heard of it recently, and maybe it's been a cult favorite in small groups of film lovers for years, but why doesn't anyone start shouting about it every time something like this happens in real life? Someone goes nuts and starts shooting people, and video games or television or heavy metal or lack of God or the pressure of our high-tech world are blamed. People have been going nuts since the dawn of time, and maybe we just don't want to admit the Good Ol' Days weren't…

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  Review by Joe ★★★★★

  Two screen menaces, one of them ornate, theatrical, and artificial, the other one hyper-real, so much so that he is more often than not uncomfortable to watch, even before he starts shooting bullets at the audience. And Bogdanovich makes them both sing, separately and then ultimately, inevitably, together.

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  Review by Dante Izrael ★★★★

  Bogdanovich casting himself in his feature debut as some young hotshot film director - genius move. rest easy king.

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  Review by Filipe Furtado ★★★★½ 2

  Targets is pretty much a film cut from the same cloth as other late 60’s exercises in anti illusionism like David Holzman’s Diary, Hi Mom or Medium Cool but filtered through Peter Bogdanovich very Hollywood sensibility. It delivers a lot of humor from both Karloff Bartebly like refusal to take part in Hollywood machinery and the very matter of fact way Bogdanovich shots the sniper material. Some of the meta jokes are too cute and less clever than Targets thinks. There is a raw bluntness to the violence here that has more to do with uncredited co screenwriter Samuel Fuller than Bogdanovich later work. The violence here is sudden and ugly, it has a shock that moves it way beyond…

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  Review by Eli Hayes ★★★★½ 2

  Those first thirty-eight minutes are set up chillingly. Gotta love when a film's "calm before" can be appreciated just as deeply as its storm. Don't read a thing about this; don't even read the Letterboxd description or what's written on the cover art, unless you already have.

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  Review by ALISTAIR LEACH ★★★½

  Does anyone else find it funny after all these years even with their final roles before their deaths, that Karloff still overshadowed Lugosi.

  Here we have a very fine epitaph to the actor, lampooning his roles and career with warmth, wit and charm, however at the end of the film he is given dignity by playing the hero for a final time. Directed by someone who would in the next decade become one of the hottest things in town.

  Lugosi, well what more needs to be said than Plan 9 and Glen or Glenda....

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  Review by reibureibu ★★★★ 2

  Frankenstein's monster is ugly and grotesque, an aberration born from chemistry, alchemy, and some admittedly-deft surgery, a nameless entity that terrifies others and shunned by society despite his sensitive character and purity of heart.

  John Doe is young, amiable, and handsome (but unassumingly so), a home-grown young adult male born in Suburbia America, a nameless entity that charms others and welcomed by society despite his disturbed personality and fractured psyche.

  Targets is the tale of two monsters that meet, two sides of horror and how we respond to them, how the horror of the past serves as entertainment for the present while the horror of the now lurks in much more terrifying ways.

  Frankenstein's monster kills in rage, in self-defense, in pursuit of rightful existence. John Doe kills without even knowing why.