Skilfully stitched together at the behest of Roger Corman from two days shooting with Boris Karloff, a crappy old horror flick and a couple of weeks' work with mostly unknown actors, Peter Bogdanovich's gripping debut manages to be both a daringly nihilistic story of a psycho sniper on the loose as well as a comparison of modern cinema's new, psychological horrors to the traditional Gothic shenanigans of Corman and Hammer.
A neglected gem and a real cinematic sowís-ear-to-silk-purse story.