I Just Saw

The Exterminator is basically a vetsploitation take on the slasher; “vetsploitation” being a sub-genre of the exploitation film wherein Vietnam veterans and their experiences/traumas were used as material for screenplays. Just like in a slasher, a cold open informs what follows before the story structures itself around a series of murders carried out by its iconic centre, in this case, a vet turned dockyard worker played by Robert Ginty. Ginty’s life is saved twice by his best friend (Steve James), a fellow vet who rescued him from the enemy in Vietnam before intervening when a gang takes Ginty hostage at their workplace. The friend is subsequently crippled by the gang and Ginty’s quest begins.

I couldn’t help laughing at the complete lack of transition between Ginty relating his friend’s condition to the man’s wife (which itself follows straight from the crippling scene) and then taking revenge on the first attacker. And when I say “complete lack”, I mean it. We fade from the scene with the wife DIRECTLY to the thug tied up and being menaced with a flamethrower. It’s like five scenes are missing. 

You wonder what the script looked like. (“Ginty and best friend’s wife cry together = ???? = first revenge scene”) What made me laugh, though, was when either Ginty or the punk (I forget which) refers to the attack on Ginty’s friend as having taken place that morning.

What?! You mean, in the space of several hours the friend was found, taken to hospital, and treated; Ginty was informed (before the wife for some reason?) or maybe stumbled across what happened somehow, informed the wife, decided to take revenge, obtained a flamethrower (????) and presumably tranquilisers (easy for a dockyard worker?); investigated sufficiently to confirm that a) the same gang that crippled his friend were the ones who attacked them at the dock, and b) where their weakest link could be found; and then gained sufficient opportunity to tranquilise this person before tying him up and interrogating him? And I feel accomplished if I get my washing done in an afternoon.

This has to be one of the most egregious howlers in film plotting. Nonetheless, the film does sometimes rise to the level of atmosphere, kind of. When Ginty infiltrates a thugs’ hideout and delivers the line “that [n word] was my best friend” to a racist assailant, “Disco Inferno” plays in the background, and you get a sense of the intensity the scene could have had with better acting. God bless Ginty, who seems to have been a good guy who led an interesting life, but here at least he’s not even on autopilot. There’s no hue or shade to his acting; it’s like if you got some random friend to play the role.

What remains The Exterminator’s main appeal, then, is its insight into ‘70s New York before much of its inner city was cleaned up to be less of a depressing, crime-ridden hellhole. Some shots here look post-apocalyptic. It also reveals just how much sleaze there was, and the darkest criminality so close to the surface of things. The most disturbing subplot in the film involves a sex and torture dungeon which traffics in “chicken”, code (which has been used by real-world predators) for young boys.

Because the film can’t show underage males in this context, of course, the only victim you see is a man in his twenties (his buttocks revealed in a lingering shot, which seems odd for a film whose assumed audience would have been straight men). But it’s still distressing. His attacker is “a senator from New Jersey” who pays high prices to abuse. It feels prescient, or simply aware of what our elites will pay for, and what can be supplied to them.

I should mention that there’s a plot thread about the detective (Christopher George) investigating Ginty’s murders, but it’s so incidental it makes no odds. The only memorable thing about it is an ugly scene where he bullies information from a sex worker by tying her up in a cell and refusing her methadone. Very heroic. The storytelling is so disjointed and lacking in motive power that the detective scenes almost seem like they’re from a different movie.

Writer/director James Glickenhaus seems to have been a yeoman hack in the Roger Corman/Lloyd Kaufman mould. He retired in 1995, save for a couple of acting credits, and since focused on being an automotive entrepreneur who collects former racing vehicles. A sequel to The Exterminator, simply called Exterminator 2, came out four years later and though Ginty returned Glickenhaus did not. For a rip-off of Death Wish (1974), you could do worse than The Exterminator, though you’re more likely to enjoy it if you have a special interest in trash cinema.

Rating: 2/4