Ilona Grubel Movies

Arthur Penn takes a crack at subverting the espionage film genre in Target. Walter Lloyd (Gene Hackman) is a quiet and unassuming lumberyard owner in Dallas, Texas. Chris (Matt Dillon) has dropped out of college to pursue a career as a race car driver. But all mundane tasks come to an end when Walter's wife Donna (Gayle Hunnicutt) is kidnapped while on a European trip. Walter flies to Paris with Chris to see what can be done. Once in Europe, Chris is shocked to discover that his dad was once a top CIA agent. Together, the two visit all of Walter's old CIA contacts in an effort to locate Donna. Finally, Walter discovers that Donna has been kidnapped by a rogue spy seeking revenge for an incident that happened eighteen years earlier. Now Walter must apply his old and vicious CIA tricks to save his wife from an old and vicious CIA operative. ~ Paul Brenner, Rovi

Daring for its time, this speculative German movie uses vampirism as a metaphor for European fascism. Somehow rendered impervious to sunlight, members of the vampire aristocracy -- led by an evil Count (Paul Albert Krumm) -- swiftly rise to power and subjugate the peasant populace as slave labor and surplus blood supply. Enter humanity's last hope, an unlikely hero named Jonathan (Jürgen Jung), who launches a crusade against the Count's powerful armies of the undead. Loosely based on Dracula, this film makes a few stylistic nods to F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, as well as to Hammer's Dracula series, but manages a few original twists of its own. Several nude scenes were added for the film's wider European release. ~ Cavett Binion, Rovi