When it comes to tactless examples of vigilante cinema, there’s something about the simple sleeze of James Glickenhaus’ fascinatingly nasty The Exterminator that really stood out. Lacking even a rudimentary sense of political moralising that even Michael Winner’s Death Wish mentioned at least once or twice, the brutal misadventures of frazzled Vietnam vet John Eastland almost carried a perverse since of purity about it as it roasted pedophiles alive and lowered mob bosses into meat grinders.
Considering how many far-right wet dreams the Cannon Group made in its heyday, it’s nothing short of a fucking miracle that they didn’t somehow bankroll that grotty little enterprise – however, in 1984, they managed to rectify this iniquity by coughing up the cash to make a sequel.
However, as the studio had something of a habit of turning everything they laid their hands on into a ridiculous cartoon with all the subtlety of whoopee cushion, something fittingly bizarre was about to be born.
Like most vigilante movies, we get a typically heavy handed opening that shows what a crime ridden hellhole the streets have become as we watch a gang of near-feral street punks beat and shoot a pair of elderly shopkeepers in the midst of a robbery. But as these examples of scum flee down the nearest alleyway, they discover that crime really doesn’t pay when they find themselves starting down the nozzle of the flamethrower of masked vigilante, the Exterminator who promptly roasts them all alive.
After reducing these lawbreakers to charcoal, we discover that life has been going pretty well for John Eastland as he splits his time between setting psycho bastards alight and wooing his exotic dancer girlfriend, Caroline. However, Eastland’s alter ego manages to set a brutal war of attrition in motion when he ignites the brother of crazed gang leader X, who has epic plans of ruling the streets despite dressing like he paintballs in Beirut. Desperate to discover the identity of the Exterminator and get some revenge for the fact that his kin is now kindling. Because Eastland is actually pretty sloppy at what he does, it actually doesn’t take much effort for X to discover his true identity and in classic vigilante form, it’s Caroline who pays the price after a vicious beating puts her dreams of being a classical dancer firmly into a wheelchair.
With his garbage man buddy and fellow vet Be Gee in tow, the Exterminator pushes back hard, aiming to quash X’s plans of urban domination by killing the ever living shit out of him just in time to rope some members of the mob into proceedings just for good measure. However, X isn’t going to go down without a fight.
While I wouldn’t exactly describe the original Exterminator a classic, there was something about its unrelenting nastiness that gifted it the same amount of grisly “thrills” as rubbernecking past a particularly haunting car crash or watching some ghoulish video your friend has found online. It may sound like faint praise, but while you may not respect what The Exterminator stood for, but you have to admire that it put in the work to be appropriately off putting. However, while the first movie kind of played like Death Wish meets Maniac, Cannon weaved their typical “magic” on the sequel by giving the sleeze a weird, comic book vibe that at times genuinely feels like a bizarre spoof. For a start, their treatment of Robert Ginty’s returning crook cooker is nothing short of confounding. The film resets the anti-hero as an actual hero despite the fact that virtually everything about his M.O. is actually detrimental to making the streets safe. He only steps in a fries bad guys after they’ve murdered their victims and he usually does via the very unheroic means of sneaking up behind them and blasting them with his flamethrower. Worse yet, if he was actually to encounter something like a crime in progress or a hostage situation, his flamethrower would be all but useless unless his willing to immolate the victim too. Ginty’s everyman looks also mean that the scenes where he has to be a romantic lead play a little weird too as he seems unnaturally hyper during his dates as he seems to be unwisely flying without a script which results in zero chemistry with Deborah Geffner’s long suffering female lead.
Making matters worse is the fact that virtually every other character with a speaking part proves to be more interesting than the lead, from Frankie Faison’s gung ho garbage man to Mario Van Peebles (yes, that Mario Van Peebles) flamboyant villain. In fact, it’s something of an amusing mistake to have cast someone which as much raw charisma as Peeples (sporting a flattop you could comfortably land a helicopter on) to act opposite a man that offers up as much charm barefaced as he does while wearing his welders mask. However, as the movie goes on, lovers of idiotic trash will be well fed by all the weird shit and inconsistencies that frequently occur. Eastland consoles himself after Caroline is paralysed by hanging out in the strip joint where she used to work; both she and Be Gee suffer from that old timey rule that only white males may be worthy to make it to the end credits; and the film features one of the most counterintuitive scores I’ve ever heard that would feel right at home in a scrolling beat em up video game lurking in the dusty corners at the back of a disreputable arcade. However, to give the devil its due, the explosions are big, the scale is out of control and the A-Team style job Eastland does on Be Gee’s garbage truck thst turns it into an armor plated, bullet spitting juggernaut is admittedly awesome.
Interestingly, Cannon tried the same trick again only a year later when Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus turned the Death Wish franchise into a similarly ghoulish cartoon with the third movie. However while I’ve always found the ridiculous “Cannonfication” of Paul Kersey legitimately hilarious (Bronson kills a guy by shooting him point blank with a rocket launcher for God’s sake), it doesn’t really hit the Exterminator quite in the same infectious way – however, I will say that the poster for Exterminator 2 is legitimately badass and maybe wrote a few checks that the finished movie couldn’t cash.
It’s about as dumb as dumb action movies get, but if you’re willing to embrace some truly crazy leaps in logic, it’s a fun beer and pizza movie that’s virtually begging for you to point and laugh at it for its entire runtime. However, more “rational” human beings who fail to see the lighter side of mass immolation, violent street crime and the casual shooting of innocents, may wish they hadn’t called in the Exterminator in the first place.
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