The Exterminator (1980)

Having survived the war in Vietnam thanks to his buddy Michael Jefferson (Steve James), PTSD-suffering vet John Eastland (Robert Ginty) is now working with Jefferson in a meat-packing plant, leading the kind of life so empty, it might as well not be one.

One day, Jefferson and Eastland prevent some members of a multi-racial gang known as the Ghetto Ghouls from stealing some stuff from their workplace. Later, the young assholes attack Jefferson in revenge, nearly killing him and leaving him paralysed, which, given his race, social status and the US medical system, adds financial strain to the emotional one, too.

Eastland pretty much loses it completely and hunts down the Ghetto Ghouls, killing them in gruesome ways. This clearly does awaken something in him, and he starts with a one man crusade against crime he happens to stumble upon, like putting the mob boss responsible for the protection racket at his place of work into a meat grinder (and stealing his money to pay for Jefferson’s medical bill), or destroying a child prostitution ring.

This is obviously not the sort of thing a guy can get away with forever. Veteran police detective James Dalton (Christopher George), who will turn out to be another Vietnam vet nearly as damaged as Eastland, is on the case. When he is not romancing a doctor played by Samantha Eggar, that is. And, weirder, the CIA also shows an interest in Eastland’s “work”, deciding that his vigilante killing spree is either a conscious attempt to show up the current powers that be’s promise to lower crime rates, or some sort of foreign ploy, which must make total sense to someone. Clearly, things can’t end well.

And depending on the cut of the film, they don’t,though the finale of John Glickenhaus’s magnum opus The Exterminator turns out differently depending on which version of it you watch. My favourite ending sees everyone die in a classic 70s US cinema fashion very fitting to a film that stands so clearly right on the border between the sort of film typical of the 70s and what would become typical for the early 80s. Consequently, things are a bit of a peculiar, yet always interesting, mix of post-Watergate grimness and pre-Reagan love for violent solutions, Glickenhaus trying and mostly managing to make a vigilante movie that isn’t trying to be as reactionary as possible, simply by virtue of Glickenhaus not attempting to take any kind of moral stance towards Eastland’s actions.

Glickenhaus treats this a bit like a documentary filmmaker of the more “objective” sort, showing us Eastland, showing us why and how he does what he does but never really assuming the “fuck yeah” attitude of many action films. In fact, there’s really little action shot to excite in the film – most of the violence is grubby, unpleasant and looks deeply uncool (so probably pretty close to actual violence), Ginty stumbles from one violent encounter to the next not so much with an expression of rage than one of tired resignation on his face, really expressing more his own inner damage than any sentiments towards the people he kills. Which is particularly ironic because his victims are as vile as they come and would certainly lend themselves to some semi-effective screeds about how much they deserve what they get, and all the other crap vigilante films like to spout. The Exterminator as a film seems just as tired and empty in affect as its titular character, breathing an air of desperation more than one of the violent excitement that’ll usually make you a grindhouse hit (though it certainly turned out to be one).

Ginty, in general not one of my favourite low budget movie actors, is perfect as Eastland here, his air of slight distraction and empty normality perfect for a guy who has been damaged so much, he feels compelled to kill but clearly doesn’t even derive satisfaction from the act, going through the motions of violence because at least when he’s killing, he doesn’t have to think anymore.

Dalton’s scenes do at first feel like filler to get the film up to a decent runtime, but eventually, it becomes clear that Glickenhaus is really trying to show us another man with the same kind of damage, our protagonist and the man hunting him not being two sides of the same coin as is genre tradition, but virtually the same, only divided by the luck of the draw, because that’s what America is in this film: a place where everybody loses, only some worse than others.

On this cheery note, it’s no wonder that Glickenhaus also adds the CIA and elements of the 70s conspiracy thriller usually absent from vigilante movies to the mix, the politics that broke Eastland and Dalton in Vietnam (and that arguably also broke the America they are now living in) still churning on like the empty machines their lives have become.


Which is rather a lot of interesting subtext for a grubby, New York vigilante movie, and certainly what makes The Exterminator a jewel in the crown of this particular genre.