The Exterminator (1980)

(In French, On Cable TV, September 2020) If you want an illustration of how ugly cinema became in the 1970s and how ready it was for this ugliness to be glossed up in the 1980s, you could scarcely do better than watch The Exterminator, which seems dead intent to redo Death Wish except with even more sadism. The story is about a Vietnam veteran taking revenge over a gang of criminals that sent an old combat buddy in a coma, but if you were fast-forwarding throughout the film, you could be forgiven for thinking that the film is about a PTSD-afflicted vet going on a gory rampage throughout Manhattan—threatening people with a flamethrower, leaving them to be eaten by rats, and dumping one of them in a meat grinder. There’s usually a line between anti-hero and psychotic nutcase, but The Exterminator doesn’t really know about that. Writer-director James Glickenhaus justifies its gory vigilantism by creating a climate of overwhelming darkness as per the prevailing mood of the 1970s, complete with a sitting US senator torturing a young woman with a soldering iron in the basement of a Manhattan brothel. It’s all too much, too ridiculous, too over-the-top and out-of-touch. While the opening Vietnam segment feels cheap, the rest of the film manages to claw its way to simple competency, but it’s the ugliness of the message that stays with viewers. Now, let’s not kid ourselves: 1980s vigilante action movies were not necessarily less gruesome in their celebration of so-called heroes killing criminals in cold blood—but they realized that the gore had to be toned down and transformed into rousing action, and that heroes needed more background for audience empathy. Still, The Exterminator shows a sorry intersection between ugly 1970s urban thrillers and out-and-out slasher movies: it’s not a high point.