Curious thriller that demonstrates Bogdanovich’s nostalgia for the old Hollywood as the Mecca of the film world. In this striking début that provides evidence of great cinephilia, two themes slowly intertwine: the demise of Hollywood, the resentment of the older generation, personified by Boris Karloff, and the increasing violence in feature films. This latter theme is depicted in the form of a psychopath with a murder complex, an apparently quiet youth from a respectable middle-class family who first shoots dead his wife, his mother and a grocer’s boy in cold blood and then fires on unsuspecting drivers from the roof of a petrol storage tank. His next target is a drive-in cinema where Karloff’s new film is being first screened. There too the result is a pandemonium of violence.
