One of the last features to showcase ailing Boris Karloff and his iconic work, Targets is a long-admired, rarely seen treatise on the old-school way of moviemaking as the new school leads the way. It also predicts, sadly, the way well-armed gunmen will undertake thrill-killing by any means necessary — an entertaining blueprint, if you will.

Targets is also the debut of a kinder kind of director Peter Bogdanovich, long before Tatum O’Neal had a sip of vodka, dating soon-deceased Playboy Playmate Dorothy Stratten and, worst of all, making At Long Last Love. Sorry!

Based on the real-life shootings at the University of Texas at Austin campus by Charles Whitman in 1966, the film is about the unmotivated actions of the personable Bobby (Tim O’Kelly). Those include killing his entire family, shooting at drivers on the highway and then headed for the local drive-in. Meanwhile, horror legend Orlok (Karloff) has decided to quit acting, but shows up at one last event: the premiere of his new picture (depicted with Karloff clips from Roger Corman’s The Terror) at the local drive-in.

Worlds collide when the madman confronts the monster, in a scene that is stilted but emotional, especially knowing the movie uses the basis for workplace and school shootings that continue to thrive in our violent culture. The last 50-plus years have seen Targets become more chilling and downright scary, even if Whitman’s name has been lost to time.

Bogdanovich’s film is incredibly well-made, with a great script and great characters; the duality between Bobby and Orlok is apparent. O’Kelly is terrific as the mild-mannered lad with the brooding veneer of a psycho; it’s the way real killers should act on screen, instead of being a carbon-copy of Charles Manson.

Targets is a wholly engaging picture of a fictionally creative mind against the horror of a psychotic mind. Like Stephen King’s Rage or Judas Priest’s music, it targets the art, the artists and how the diseased mind works, good or bad. Either way, Targets respects the filmic past while it immolates the immediate future. —Louis Fowler

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One of Britain’s more notorious serial killers, John Christie claimed at least eight victims in the 1940s and ’50s. Thankfully, given its potency, 10 Rillington Place depicts precious few. The film by The Boston Strangler director Richard Fleischer limits itself to events in 1949, when the down-on-their-luck Evans family rents a room in Christie’s flat.

A thumb of a man in unassuming suspenders and spectacles, Christie (Richard Attenborough) redefines manipulative with his new tenants, illiterate workingman Tim (John Hurt, 2014’s Hercules) and brand-new mother Beryl (Judy Geeson, Here We Go Round the Mulberry Bush). Christie possesses a roving eye and accompanying urges for Mrs. Evans. When she gets pregnant again — not ideal as they’re barely scrape by — Christie all too eagerly volunteers to perform a scraping of his own.

From there, 10 Rillington Place goes to horrific places. Time has not diluted the film’s ability to shock, not even for watchers desensitized by contemporary true-crime series about Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy and their sick ilk. While staged with professional excellence by Fleischer, the movie’s primary source is Attenborough. His childlike psychopath will forever change subsequent viewings of his happy-go-lucky Dr. Hammond in Jurassic Park. His Christie is unforgettable. In one scene, Attenborough seamless goes from confident to terrified to calm to sexual over the course of a single action. He’s perfect casting.

Ditto for Hurt, whose beleaguered Tim undergoes a transition from boarish to sympathetic in the face of tragedy. Make no mistake, the real-life events within the Notting Hill address were nothing less. While Fleischer dares to “go there,” so to speak, Rillington never feels tacky or crass. After all, it’s just a movie, standing in front of a viewer, asking them to relive it. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Before we discuss Follow Her, we have to talk about its screenwriter and lead actress, Dani Barker. You’re less likely to have heard of her from her credits (The Scarehouse, anyone?) than you are her YouTube documentary series, Starvival. As a struggling actress in NYC across its two seasons, she answered oddball audition ads, recording the suspicious encounters — from skeevy to phony, like being tickled for an hour — via hidden camera to warn fellow women and, yes, to get her name out there.

Now, in Follow Her, Barker plays Jess, a fictionalized version of herself. Jess does the same undercover work for the cash and the likes, all while Dad implores her to get a “real” job. While I find the Barker of yesteryear’s Starvival cloying, the Barker of Follow Her has gifted her talents quite the showcase. Directed by Sylvia Caminer (the Rick Springfield documentary An Affair of the Heart), the movie stands tall on its own merits, but is even more interesting once you know about its real-life origins.

After responding to an ad seeking an “attractive female writer” to help finish an erotic thriller script, Jess realizes she may have crossed a line in her quest for influencer infamy. After all, the guy (Luke Cook, TV’s Chilling Adventures of Sabrina) wants to meet in an uncrowded park and invites her to his remote barn. Despite all the red flags unfurled, she accepts, and most of Follow Her depicts the evening — perhaps her last — as it unfolds.

Although Barker gives a terrific performance, her script impresses most. To her immense credit, I wasn’t always sure what was on the up and up. The plot is so well-structured, I kept wondering whether the story would end up at Door A or Door B, only to arrive at a third option I hadn’t considered. Cook’s intensity matches Barker’s vulnerability as their characters play games both psychological and physical. With so much of it occurring in a single location among two people, the picture exudes a refreshing degree of intimacy, almost as if presented for the stage. It may sound like overpraise, but I sensed some Deathtrap vibes for the entirety of the second act; for this stretch, Ira Levin might be, if not proud, at least a smidge jealous. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Based on a 2001 British made-for-TV movie, Danny Boyle’s Trance casts X-Men: First Class’ James McAvoy (presumably standing in for Ewan McGregor) as Simon, an art auctioneer who becomes a media hero for foiling the heist of an über-valuable painting, yet pays the price when the would-be thief, Franck (Vincent Cassel, Jason Bourne), comes looking for it.

Trouble is, the knock to the noggin Franck gives Simon during the fray results in a bout of amnesia. To jog the priceless artwork’s location from the recesses of Simon’s mind, Franck sends him to a hypnotherapist (Rosario Dawson, Sin City).

From then on, viewers can question how much of what Boyle shows you can be trusted, as fragments of their hypnotizing sessions bleed into reality, and vice versa. While some may call this approach a mind-fuck, Trance emerges as too much of a mess to earn that badge.

Boyle sandwiched this baby in between his two-year planning stint as artistic director for the 2012 Olympics in London, and it shows. Whereas every twist and turn and layer of Christopher Nolan’s then-recent Inception felt meticulously graphed and charted and calculated, Trance feels as if its script pages were thrown into the air, and whatever Boyle caught, he shot and edited in that order.

The result is minor Boyle (as opposed to the major likes of Trainspotting). I admire sequences of the film while being somewhat cold on it as a whole. The theatricality of certain scenes is one plus, bearing influence of Boyle’s other Olympics side project, a UK stage production of a radically rebuilt Frankenstein. I think in particular of a scene where Simon hears Franck and his goons plotting against him in a loft above; he and we see the bad guys only as larger-than-life silhouettes amid butterscotch-colored light — a gorgeously structured image in a movie teeming with ugly deeds.

At least one of those scenes springs with a smidgen of goodwill, but it’s an unintended howler. I won’t spoil it, but you’ll know it when you see it. Or hear it, rather — just listen for the sound of an electric razor buzzing to life.

Art and artifice are Boyle’s ultimate themes, and he joyously maneuvers his characters so we’re constantly wondering, “Who’s manipulating whom?” The answer is that Boyle is manipulating his audience, but not skillfully enough that most viewers will be in the mood to be shifted and shoved. Trance is too slick and too empty for its own good. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Nefarious sells itself as a demonic-possession horror thriller. However, like Kirk Cameron’s Saving Christmas presenting as a family comedy, only to reveal itself as a two-person sermon on evangelical Christianity, so is Nefarious. Thou shall not bear false witness and all …

Serial killer Edward Wayne Brady (Sean Patrick Flanery, Saw 3D) is hours away from a blind date with the electric chair. Arriving at the prison, Dr. Martin (Jordan Belfi, Surrogates) is assigned to give Brady a psych evaluation, because the law states if he is insane, he cannot be executed. Seems like a big ol’ box that could’ve been checked anytime before the felon’s last day on earth, but just go with it.

Right away, Brady tells “ignorant sack of meat” Dr. Martin four incredibly bonkers things:
1. He wants to be executed.
2. But he can’t be killed.
3. Because he’s the devil.
4. Furthermore, the doc will commit three murders before the night’s through.

That’s a terrific setup, full of story possibilities. Instead, Brady and Martin sit and debate theology for an hour, with only the occasional potty, phone and/or smoke break for the doc. Brady not only works at convincing Martin of supernatural evil, but tries to get Martin to let the satanic spirit inhabit him and write the “dark gospel.” Their elongated conversation entails the kind of philosophical blabbering and muddy analogies one witnesses through clips of fundamentalist preachers at the pulpit or from the mentally ill on street corners, both using a ton of words to talk ’round and ’round the same circle.

I bear no built-in opposition to faith-based films … when they function as a movie first and impart a lesson second. Good examples of this can be found in the feature adaptations of Ted Dekker’s House and Thr3e (not to mention Dekker’s novels themselves). His stories are constructed with propulsive suspense, and viewers leave with a clear understanding of his message and beliefs without feeling like their head was held under bathwater by someone shouting demands for their repentance. (Another? William Friedkin’s The Exorcist. No, really.)

Shot in Oklahoma, Nefarious comes from Chuck Konzelman and Cary Solomon, who have found box-office riches with God’s Not Dead, God’s Not Dead 2, God’s Not Dead: We the People and — eventually, I presume — Are You There, Margaret? It’s Me, God, Still Not Dead. While I haven’t seen any of those, I can say Nefarious’ preaching-to-the-choir moralizing struck me in an off-putting way I couldn’t put my finger on. Afterward (via Google, as the screener had no credits), I understood why: It’s based on a book by Steve Deace, the conservative talk show host, college dropout and election denier who rallies against “COVID-19 tyranny” and pronouns — the kind of hateful, ignorant, boogeyman politics that unfortunately seep into “the church” these days.

Speaking of fire and brimstone, Flanery admirably devotes his blinking, twitchy, stammering all to his performance. While he obviously has the showier part, he wipes the acting floor with Belfi, who at times seems to be impersonating Ben Stiller impersonating Tom Cruise, but seriously. Rounding out the cast is Deace’s boss, inflammatory, fact-bending conspiracy theorist Glenn Beck, playing himself. Judging from Beck’s extended, last-scene cameo to essentially plug Deace’s novel, the sartorial choices of multishirted serpent Steve Bannon have rubbed off on him, because I counted no fewer than four layers covering his torso. —Rod Lott

Opens in theaters April 14.