Thriller

Targets (1968)

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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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Comedy

A Swingin’ Summer (1965)

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Six months before William Wellman Jr. and James Stacy went all Winter a-Go-Go in a Beach Party knockoff, they had themselves A Swingin’ Summer in a Beach Party knockoff.

As the respective Rick and Mickey, Wellman and Stacy play different characters than they would that Winter. With Rick’s scorching-hot redheaded girlfriend in tow (Quinn O’Hara, The Ghost in the Invisible Bikini, the California teens head to Lake Arrowhead for the weeklong job at its dance pavilion. When that gainful employment opportunity suddenly dries up, they decide to run it themselves, Andy Hardying the heck out of the place. That way, the likes of Gary Lewis & the Playboys, The Righteous Brothers and The Rip Chords can give full performances — each rockin’ and rousin‘ — to fill precious running time.

No doubt director Robert Sparr (Once You Kiss a Stranger …) was all for that plan, seeing as how the script is absent a plot. Prepare for one light kidnapping, some fistfighting, one instance of asphalt surfing and a lot of butt-shaking, not to mention gratuitous Frugging with a side of Watusi.

Not long after Mickey creepily takes a tape measure to girls’ bikini-topped busts (two decades before Screwballs‘ similar but rapeier breast-exam prank), he engages in a “poultry contest,” which is to say a game of chicken on water skis. Most teenpics would slate such an action-packed sequence as the climax, but A Swingin’ Summer instead sticks it in the middle section. That leaves room for quite the twist ending: that the psych student played by a debuting Raquel Welch — shrinking heads while enlarging others — is actually hot, once she removes her glasses and shakes her hair out of a bun. Can you fucking believe it?

Fun enough and equally inconsequential, Swingin’ dog-paddles behind the aforementioned AIP fare. Still, by recruiting Pajama Party’s Diane Bond as The Girl in the Pink Polka Dot Bikini, it’s doing something right. Pop a cap on a return-for-deposit bottle of Bubble Up, then press play. —Rod Lott

Get it at dvdparty.

Action

Smokey & the Judge (1980)

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Of the many Smokey and the [Insert Noun Here] movies that followed Burt Reynolds’ Bandit box-office bonanza, Smokey & the Judge is arguably the most obscure. Oddly, it’s the only one that stars a music group with a Billboard hit: Hot, the R&B trio of Gwen Owens, Cathy Carson and Juanita Curiel.

Yeah, I hadn’t heard of them, either.

At any rate, their one and only movie (aka Makin’ It, Runnin’ Hot and Strong Together) follows the three ladies of Hot as they pursue chart stardom. Margo (Owens) and Carol (Carson) just have to get out of prison first. While behind bars, Carol responds to a computer dating ad by giving answers like “peanut butter underwear.” This matches her with Morris Levy (Darrow Igus, John Carpenter’s The Fog), who happens to be a talent manager and promises them an L.A. recording contract.

Once they’re out and joined by Carol’s pal Maria (Curiel), Morris books them into a dumpy bar where a construction worker in a hard hat brings his beer-drinking pet snake. With great voices to make up for no personalities, the girls are a hit with the crowd! If only they can keep from running afoul of the redneck sheriff (Gene Price), the corpulent judge (Joe Marmo, American Drive-In), their bitchy parole officer (A’leshia Brevard, TV’s Legend of the Superheroes) and other miscreants, they may just make it after all.

So much for story! The running time is padded with half a dozen more-than-competent song performances, plus weak car chases, a Volkswagen Bus explosion, a biplane explosion, non-exploding motorcycles, gas siphoning, dog pissing, hot pants wearing, Harper Valley P.T.A.-ready sex pranks and one aggressive act of pouring ketchup down the crotch of Hack-O-Lantern’s repellent Hy Pyke.

Just as Hot was a one-hit wonder (“Angel in Your Arms”), Smokey & the Judge is Dan Seeger’s only movie as director. Having edited Al Adamson’s Death Dimension, he’s as terrible behind the camera as you’d think. Although some of the jail scenes are shot in a genuine clinker, others clearly were done in an apartment, complete with a “NO TOUCHING” sign Sharpie’d by hand. None of this amounts to a recommendation, not even for nondiscerning hicksploitation fans. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Horror

Hi-Fear (2022)

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What are you afraid of, asks the horror anthology Hi-Fear. A comic-book publisher poses the question to Natalie (Kristen Lorenz, 2019’s Bliss), a freelance illustrator hired for same-day-turn work. She’s told to draw whatever scares her most, with each round of real-time hot sketchbook action segueing into one of four tales.

First, a virgin is gifted “the Hope Diamond of pussy” for his birthday by friends. However, the whorehouse is staffed with killer prostitutes. Todd Sheets (Final Caller) quickly turns his ’80-style T&A comedy into extended gore, gleefully practical. Next, the legendary Tim Ritter (Killing Spree) turns his camera on a pastor with a bad toupée — and even worse temper — who kills his “jezebel” of a wife. This occurs after a confusing mélange of snake handling, eyeball puncturing and side-boob drug injecting. At least the pastor’s dialogue is far-right riotous: “This is the attire of a whore!”

Sodomaniac director Anthony Catanese’s segment is the shortest, but also boasts the best camerawork, as a young woman is terrorized by a mentally ill homeless man known on the streets as Krazy Killer Karl. Finally, in the most unconventional story, Camp Blood creator Brad Sykes (also responsible for the Natalie wraparound) depicts the making of an indie movie on a mountain where it’s never night. Maybe that cosmic ball of light has something to do with it?

Capping the trilogy, Hi-Fear follows 2013’s Hi-8 and 2018’s Hi-Death. A perceivable improvement over Hi-Death, it still suffers from a decreased story count set by the original’s octet. Ironically, as the Dogme 95-style shot-on-video rules established for Hi-8 have loosened considerably with each franchise installment, overall levels of quality and fun have decreased. —Rod Lott

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Kitchen Sink

The Fisher King (1991)

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WTFFor good reason, The Fisher King is one of the most heralded works of filmmaker Terry Gilliam, but one I had never watched before. Originally, I thought it was about some modern-day knights and the late Robin Williams cast as a chief Central Park bum. To be fair, I did own a previously viewed copy of it on VHS. Does that count?

I had embarked on a long-forgotten quest to find the time to watch it, which I finally did with the Criterion Collection edition last week. I realized the movie was so much more than another Gilliam visual feast for the mind, because of it has a soiled, ramshackle heart.

Jack (Jeff Bridges) is a stereotypical ’90s shock jock, putting callers through the metaphorical meat grinder. This all goes bad for him when a crazed fan shoots up a party of full of people (back when things like that weren’t everyday occurrences). Three years later, he’s a clerk at a rundown video shop. When a young boy gives him a Pinocchio puppet, it sends Jack into suicide mode. And when a duo of New York toughs try to immolate him, thank God for Parry (Williams) and his homeless cadre rush out of the storm to slay this murderous party.

From there, Parry charges Jack to find the Holy Grail, with comedy, drama and, most of all, the rusted heart. The film does this without being too cloying and superficial — something much of Williams’ work came to be in the late ’90s and early 2000s.

Sure, the artistic angles, the grating noise and the sheer claustrophobia are all there, but Williams’ performance stands out most as remarkable. Perry acts like a man out of time — the “janitor of God,” he puts it — with this quest helping to work out demons of his own. We learn the source of his mental anguish when all goes south.

Gilliam is masterful at nightmarish scenarios. Here, one with a bold-but-dirty face gets a happy ending, but it’s one this movie truly deserves. Also, out-of-the-norm actors like Amanda Plummer, Tom Waits and Michael Jeter are excellent in their supporting roles.

Fear of the unknown is one of Gilliam’s mainstays, but The Fisher King is about embracing it. —Louis Fowler

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