Targets

A few hours before he arrived at the University of Texas tower to kill 13 people and wound 31 others. Charles Whitman strolled into an Austin hardware store and picked out several boxes of rifle cartridges. What was all the ammunition for? the clerk asked. "To shoot some pigs," Whitman answered calmly. In all its chilling banality, that scene is faithfully reproduced in this lightly fictionalized saga of a mass murderer. Self-consciously billed as the answer to the question "Why Gun Control?", Targets eventually falls victim to artistic overkill.

In the movie, Charles Whitman is Bobby Thompson (Tim O'Kelly), a clean-cut gun-toting Boy Next Door who mutters his frustrations in asides such as, "You think I can't do any thing, don't you?"Bobby sets out to prove what he can do. He begins by methodically killing his wife and mother. Then, from an oil-storage tank and later at a drive-in theater, he coolly fires away at helpless motorists trapped in their cars. The slaughter does not end until Boris Karloff, stoically suffering through a prolonged cameo appearance as a fading horror-movie star, collars the killer. "I hardly ever missed, did I?" says Bobby to the police as the handcuffs go on.

Targets does make one sorry improvement on life, however. Bobby kills far more bystanders than Whitman did. The endlessly repetitive fusillades suggest that Writer-Director Peter Bogdanovich, in his first film, was really intent on creating the most prolific murderer in Hollywood's long history of violence. Unfortunately, it is a record made to be broken.

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