Starts off quite promisingly, with some clever dialogs and an interesting plot about a retiring old actor.<br /><br />But Bogdanovich unfortunately had something else in mind.<br /><br />He introduces a character who quite obviously will turn into a spree-killer, and the movie re-directs its focus almost solely on him. Now, I understand the points that Bogdanovich was trying to make with this story, but somehow he fell into a Hitchcockian trap, i.e. he let shock and horror overtake the logic. Just like the just-mentioned chubby Englishman with a penchant for ignoring logic and insulting the (intelligent) viewer's intelligence, Bogdanovich serves us some nonsense. Bullets are flying left and right, and corpses just pile up, yet it takes ages for people to hear the bullets or realize the direness of any of a number of situations with the random shooting. The spree-killer shoots three times in his home, in what is presumably an idyllic middle-class suburbia, and no one calls the police! No one hears the bullets. And the scene where Karloff approaches the killer may be well thought-out but combined with the ensuing face-slapping it belongs more in a comedy or a fantasy then a movie which strives for realism. Karloff's female assistant is as Chinese as Jennifer Lopez.<br /><br />Bogdanovich is wise not to have pursued an acting career; he comes off amateurish. Bogdanovich's line "All the good films have already been made" has more irony than brain cells in Einstein's brain. Pretty much at the time this movie was made the actual golden age of movies had already begun. The vast bulk of the classics were made from the late 60s onwards. What a BAD PREDICTION by a relatively likable but quite overrated director, who should have stuck to writing his pretentious, dull film-reviews.