Tight, suspenseful, full of cross-cutting scenes to follow the unfolding of two stories that are about to merge into one, TARGETS is the last major feature film that BORIS KARLOFF made, and it’s one of his best during the latter part of his career.

He’s a man about to retire from the picture business, a horror film star called Byron Orlock, feeling he’s too much of an anachronism in the changing world of the late ’60s and that his kind of horror is passé. The part, in other words, is tailor-made to fit Karloff’s real-life persona.

The other strand of the story has to do with a deeply disturbed young man (TIM O’KELLY) who appears normal on the surface but is harboring ideas of using his arsenal of guns to become a killer. After slaughtering his family, he climbs a tower near a crowded highway and proceeds to target various cars at random, going for the kill with a sharpshooter’s precision.

He then turns his attention to a drive-in theater, where Byron Orlock is about to make a personal appearance along with his latest film. It’s here that the two stories blend into one, as Orlock arrives to make his personal appearance and must confront the killer. It’s here that the ending is a little hard to buy, as the script has Orlock becoming heroic enough to stand up to a mad killer.

Tense, disturbing, extremely well edited so that the stories blend together smoothly, the only other members of the cast that I recognized were JAMES BROWN, who plays the boy’s father–a hunter who likes to take his son on father/son hunting trips–and PETER BOGDANOVICH, who plays the director trying to get Orlock to read his script. Let’s just say, he’s better off behind the camera.

A minor gem, it’s well worth watching and Karloff’s fans get to see him in some vintage footage from his old films.