It opens with Boris Karloff skulking through one of Corman's paste-walled castles, before the lights come up and the aged, tanned horror star (as "Orlok") winces in the screening room. The footage is from The Terror, from which Peter Bogdanovich fashioned his feature debut, along with Karloff for a couple of days. As befits a self-reflexive AIP exercise (and forerunner of the American New Wave), the picture has Bogdanovich himself as a young filmmaker scrambling to wrangle Karloff for his next script; the veteran, aware of his own irrelevancy (variously tagged "dinosaur," "relic," "antique"), announces his retirement from playing waxy ghouls. Across the street, Tim O'Kelly, square-jaw and crew-cut, aims a rifle from the gun shop, the last time the two narrative strands are to intersect until the climax. Until then, O'Kelly contemplates the bland pastels of his suburban house, plays target-practice with his dad and, in one extended mid-distance shot, goes from living room TV chatter to fumbled attempt at voicing the turmoil brewing under candy bar-munching wholesomeness ("I get funny ideas"). Soon enough, he tries out the arsenal he keeps in the car trunk, first on his family then on random people -- targets. Trailing the Charles Whitman killings and the Kennedy-King assassinations (to say nothing of Vietnam), Bogdanovich's remains a '68 tract, morally and aesthetically: toiling in the age of blank-faced snipers and defanged "camp," the film is an elegy for unjaded times and auteur-appreciation ("All the good movies have been made," Bogdanovich sighs after gawking at a snippet from Hawks' The Criminal Code). The rampant cinephilia, anticipating '70s Movie Brattiness as well as post-modernism, ponders classical weight in contemporary setting, idol shout-outs emerging as evocations of cinema's past -- enormous Citizen Kane typing, gore-mopping a la Psycho, White Heat's atomic finale. Fittingly, Bogdanovich heralds the medium's death throes by locating the climax at the drive-in, a languid zoom revealing the rifle barrel sticking out of the screen, then bullets raining on to the audience to be vanquished by Karloff's quaky but undying iconography. Cinematography by Laszlo Kovacs. With Nancy Hsueh, Tanya Morgan, Arthur Peterson, and Sandy Baron.
--- Fernando F. Croce
|