The Exterminator (1980)

Very Cool!!!

Let me be very fair here, this is not the best movie in my opinion. But, this movie is fun, it has purpose and is very enjoyable to watch.

It’s not bad or unwatchable but despite the amplitude of the spectacle, the end result is underwhelming.

The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

THE EXTERMINATOR (1980) is one hell of a brutal Thriller set in that scary as hell & violently dark battleground known as 70s/80s New York City, A very dangerous place full of savage scum, violent gangs, brutal gangsters & seedy sickos just a place to breed a Vigilante like John Eastland portrayed by the very good & underrated Robert Ginty, here Eastland is an ex Vietnam soldier who came from the crazy war into the even crazier City Streets & flips after his best friend & war buddy is beaten by a vicious gang so badly he's paralysed & that sets off this Great VIGILANTE Eastland on his mission to exterminate all scum. A truly fantastic Thriller that's dark & moody & very realistic with Ginty giving his best performance of his career!!! This movie is up there with TAXI DRIVER & DEATH WISH & all the other gritty revenge films, this is truly a Cult CLASSIC

Some movies earn their reputation on 'Shock-Value' alone. After reading other reviews it seems there is a fairly broad range of tastes and cultural sophistication among the reviewers that range from sadistically deranged to seemingly emotionally balanced.I vaguely remember this movie when it was released. I was 12 and I don't recall anyone talking about it. So I suppose it was box-office flop. Outside of its shocking violence the movie is about as uninspiring, cheesy, clumsy and repugnant as one could find. Honestly, the production values are as cut-rate as one would find in an average porn film. The Exterminator shamelessly rips off the Vigilante tale, undoubtedly, from Death Wish, a better movie. But it doesn't even have the quality acting, believable script or production values of Death Wish. It is simply a moronic tale of an urban nobody who avenges the death of his friend. Then inexplicably, without any noticeable character development, emotional range or dramatic arc, the lead actor, Robert Ginty, goes on a maniacal rampage to become a homicidal maniac who exceeds the carnage of the thugs he chooses to target. There are several torture scenes that are not only implausible in nature and nuance, but seem to just grade against the monotone plot. There are a series of slow plot developments that occur only through coincidence that are punctuated by brutal torture and offings. A couple of the acts committed by the protagonist are so hideous that they are actually more heinous than any deed committed by the thugs or creeps depicted in the film. I'm not sure if this was intentional or not, because the movie is not sophisticated enough to distinguish due justice or a senseless rampage. The only hope for this movie's theme is if we engage in the idea that violence begets violence and its bloody consequences. But the film doesn't even achieve that level of social consciousness. And therefore is nothing more than gratuitous and cinematic crud. It just plays out like a messy series of sketches that illustrate some Right-wing fantasy of ridding criminals. I guess this film was hoping to bank on the American public's cry for justice during a time when America was plagued with urban blight during the Carter administration and its ineffective and lenient judicial system.Typically, the movie is also a timepiece of its own era (Late 70's and early 80's) with laughably bad hairstyles. The acting is pretty bad in parts. Christopher George, as the lead detective, is too incompetent and lethargic as a worthy nemesis to the vigilante villain. Robert Ginty is strangely bland and he's an odd choice for an anti-hero. He just seems very unfit and unconvincing in this kind of role. The thugs, perpetrators, pedophiles and mobsters in the milieu are about as menacing as an elementary school faculty. Characters are so hopelessly unbelievable in acting and presence that I'm certain they were paid very low salaries. This production also has a considerable amount of one-time actors where this was their only big-screen gig. After watching this abominable piece of celluloid it comes to no surprise. The problems with this movie are so abundant that to bother mentioning all of them would take too much space. The opening and closing ballad is also execrable.

After his friend & co-worker Michael Jefferson is brutally beaten after foiling a group of thugs from stealing cans of beer, former Vietnam Vet & warehouse worker John Eastland blows a mental fuse & hunts down the thugs responsible & shoots them dead in their own clubhouse. Arming himself with an assortment of weapons, Eastland decides to become a vigilante in order to confiscate any money from criminals & writes a letter to a news station under the name "The Exterminator". As his activities become more pronounced & violent, the police & an agent from the CIA (who is convinced that Eastland could be a foreign agent) join forces to hunt him down.In the late 1970s & early 1980s, genre cinema was becoming a major player in the controversy stakes by featuring ultra-violent tales of exploitation (mainly from the Italians with their uber-gory zombie & cannibal films) that made cult names of makeup & visual effects artists like Tom Savini. The Exterminator, a cult thriller from 1980, was banned in many countries & heavily cut in others due to its gore quotient, which was pushing boundaries at the time. It also made the name of actor Robert Ginty, who was turned into a minor B-grade action hero with this & its sequel Exterminator 2 & the sci-fi actioner PROGRAMMED TO KILL about a female cyborg assassin.The Exterminator was a minor player in the gore cinema of the time but was mainly a pedestrian cardboard thriller with some notorious scenes of gore that made its name & gave it a cult reputation. Watching this film a good thirty-five years after its release, I wasn't particularly impressed with the film's story & visuals – it only gained a cult name due to its gore which was somewhat disappointingly tame even at the time's standards. The best the film has to offer is a surprisingly nasty & realistic decapitation during the Vietnam War scene (The Exterminator was one of the very first films to depict the Vietnam War & the psychological effects it had on the people fighting in it), which was achieved with an animatronic head & the scene where Robert Ginty feeds a mafia head into an industrial meat grinder (which is more impactful by implication than actual depiction). There are also scenes where Ginty shoots a paedophile politician in the groin with mercury-laced exploding bullets & ties a pimp to a mattress & sets him on fire.Aside from the gore, The Exterminator is surprisingly pedestrian & slow going. Ginty fails to show any of the burning revenge that his character is supposed to have. What's more is that he only goes on his killing spree because he wants to prove himself by killing criminals in order to avenge his own failure to prevent his own capture during Vietnam & being mugged in the beer shed. The biggest problem is also in the ending, which builds itself up into becoming a climactic shootout but drops it suddenly & abruptly with Christopher George's cop & Ginty's hero being sniped at by a CIA sniper, Ginty surviving because of his flak vest.

The Exterminator is a borderline video nasty from the 80s heyday of the genre.Cheap looking in parts though overall shot with a higher budget than usual for this type of fare-I have to admit I was kinda rooting for Ginty's trigger happy anti-hero.Unfortunately he is given little in terms of character development but shows a good way with a one liner and handles the few sensitive moments well(surely he deserved better than ending his career on Baywatch Nights!).But it's the graphic violence that is the film's selling point-sometimes nasty other times a bit laughable.Villains are straight from central casting though manage to be unpleasant nonetheless.Movie takes an unexpected dark turn with a sequence involving a vice den-which will leave you feeling like you need a shower.I enjoyed it-with reservations.The makers of the Jason Bourne trilogy were certainly paying attention to the ending-I'l say no more than that!