Review of The Exterminator (1980) by Daniel M — 08 Jan 2013

Disturbed viet vet goes Rambo on various urban dobadders in this morally grey and grimy thriller.

Not so much a vigilante film as a slasher/superhero hybrid, what The Exterminator lacks in story or morality in general, it more then makes up for in the outstandingly savage Dystopia it sets itself in. By all means, we're in the realms of sci-fi here. A world where you come out of the womb crack in hand, a knife in the other and crawl over other dregs just hoping you grab hold of something valuable along the shuffle.

Out of this concrete congo comes John Eastland, no less sociopathic from the scum he kills, only distinction being that he lives by a code, a code which triggers a one man war on injustice in which all is fair and none is spared.

The slow pace of the film doesn't make this decent into hell any easier as minimalist sight and sound makes us aware that what we are watching is meant to be taken seriously and usually where honest intentions and incompatent execution gives a film an ironic charm, the context and content of The Exterminator is just too cold or malicious to find amusing, it's just nasty, plain and simple.

Better the film should be seen as a faliure in its intention to tell a conventional (for the 70's) story about a man pushed over the edge and more as an unintentional deconstruction of the vigilante genre in which the guy with the 44 is not on a quest for justice, but is for any motive he can latch onto, just roaming around killing lowlifes because he can't handle his own problems.

I'm not saying The Exterminator it's the "Watchmen" of revenge movies, but the way the film indulges itself in the violence it condones can make for some interesting conversation on the credibility of morality in film and if its really a tangible factor for what essentially is an act of voyeurism.