This month I contributed another review to that cool website that allows me to write from time to time: Cult Reviews. This time I wrote about "Targets" (1968), one of my favourite films from the 60s. Directed by Peter Bogdanovich, "Targets" was his debut as a filmmaker, under the wing of legendary producer Roger Corman and with the one and only Boris Karloff in the lead role. Of course, nothing came up easily, and to get that deal, Bogdanovich had to give some use to footage from Corman's "The Terror" (1963); nevertheless, Bogdanovich had a brilliant idea to use the footage: set the movie on a drive-in theatre. Powerful, crude and haunting, "Targets" was a kind of a statement, as it appeared on the final years of a decade of changes. Naturally, everything will be in greater detail at Cult Reviews.
Besides my lousy writintgs, this month Cult Reviews features a review of one of the films with the weirdest concepts for a horror movie: "One Eyed Monster" (2008), where said monster is nothing else than Ron Jeremy's detached penis. Mr. Vomitron took the job of reviewing such an interesting film and came up with a fine piece about the movie. Besides "One Eyed Monster", Vomitron tackles 2000's Swedish horror film "Det Okända" ("The Unknown"). Reviewer Coventry watched "8th Wonderland", and has many interesting conclusions about it, as it's perhaps one of the fresher films of 2008. Good ol' Perfesser Deviant writes about Vincent Ward's "What Dreams May Come", and if you wonder why such film appears on Cult Reviews, you have to check out what the Perfesser has to say about it. Finally, the Full-Length Movie of the Week is George A. Romero's legendary classic, "Night of the Living Dead" (1968), so by some reason beyond human understanding you have not seen such beauty, you can watch it here.
So, keep supporting Cult Reviews!
-------------------------------
2 comments:
Confound it, Luis! TARGETS was going to be my next, er..., target! Oh well. I'll come up with something else.
A little background: TARGETS came about because of a minor contract dispute Roger Corman had with Boris Karloff, and Boris' participation was part of the agreement the parties made to settle the matter. Corman called in Bogdanovich and told him he was going to get to direct their new Boris Karloff movie. But they originally only had Karloff for two days, so the plan was to make 20 minutes of the film footage from THE TERROR, 20 minutes of it new stuff with Boris, and 40 minutes of it new stuff with other actors. Karloff ended up staying on a little longer, and TARGETS--inspired by the Texas Tower shootings--was the result.
An interesting footnote is that, as great as it is, no one wanted it! Corman had a great deal of trouble finding a distributor for it (he pitched it to AIP under the title BLOOD & CANDY, and they turned it down). Bogdanovich finally arranged for a critic from Variety to view a screening of the movie. The fellow wrote a glowing review, noting that it was a film in search of a distributor, and the story goes that an exec at Paramount, reading it, picked up the movie.
Post a Comment