THE EXTERMINATOR: The Grindhouse Answer To TAXI DRIVER?

Grindhouse cin­ema is tra­di­tion­ally thought of as “brand x” film­mak­ing, the kind of stuff that gets cranked out for the express pur­pose of appeal­ing to the seed­ier inter­ests of the view­ing pub­lic.  To a cer­tain extent, this is true: turn­ing a profit is cru­cial at the low-budget level and film­mak­ers in this style are will­ing to go to extremes to get the job done.

However, grind­house film­mak­ing can be just as per­sonal and invested with a dis­tinct world view as the films of a main­stream film­maker.  A very unique exam­ple of this aspect of grind­house film­mak­ing is The Exterminator, the debut film of James Glickenhaus.  On the sur­face, it’s a revenge movie with dis­tinct echoes of Death Wish.  However, there’s a lot more going on under the sur­face than the film often gets credit for — and if viewed from the right per­spec­tive, inter­est­ing sim­i­lar­i­ties to Taxi Driver come into view.

But first, a plot sum­mary: a Vietnam War-set pro­logue estab­lishes the friend­ship between John Eastland (Robert Ginty) and Michael Jefferson (Steve James) when Michael saves John from get­ting killed by enemy sol­diers.  Years later, they work together in NYC’s meat-packing dis­trict.  Michael has moved on to have a fam­ily but John seems to be aim­less.  However, things change when Michael once again saves John from a gang of punks try­ing to rob their work­place — and said punks retal­i­ate by beat­ing Michael so badly he ends up par­a­lyzed and semi-comatose.  John takes to the street, using his old army gear to track down and kill the men responsible.

In most grind­house flicks, the above syn­op­sis would be the entire plot… but this only rep­re­sents the first half-hour of The Exterminator.

After tak­ing down the gang, John turns his atten­tion to oth­ers who make life dif­fi­cult for the peo­ple of New York City.  His tar­gets include every­one from a mob­ster who shakes down his boss for pro­tec­tion money to a chicken-hawk pimp who pro­cures young boys for his sleazy clien­tele.  Meanwhile, Detective James Dalton (Christopher George), a cop who is like John is cer­tain key ways, is try­ing to track him down — and so are some shad­owy gov­ern­ment oper­a­tives who fear that John’s vengeance cam­paign will cre­ate a hos­tile atmos­phere for their administration.

The end result has earned its rep­u­ta­tion as one of the genre’s grim clas­sics.  The Exterminator is punc­tu­ated by a bar­rage of shocks, with the vio­lence often hav­ing a Grand Guignol edge to it.  Grisly high­lights include one of the most con­vinc­ing behead­ings in film his­tory, cour­tesy of effects whiz Stan Winston, and a scene that involves a mafioso being sus­pended over an industrial-size meat grinder.  The Vietnam War pro­logue shows Glickenhaus’ flair for explo­sive action, a tal­ent that would serve him well in later flicks like The Soldier and Shakedown.

The Exterminator isn’t bash­ful about its sleaze con­tent, either.  Glickenhaus por­trays Times Square and the Bronx in all their seedy glory, tak­ing the audi­ence inside bondage dens, ten­e­ment gang hide­outs and “hot sheet” motels as his hero descends into a sor­did urban under­world.  The sequences involv­ing the chick­en­hawk pimp are par­tic­u­larly skin-crawling, with a level of squalid detail right out of a tabloid news­pa­per story.

Elsewhere, the sleaze is off­set with odd­ball urban guer­rilla touches, like a sequence where John makes his own mercury-tipped bul­lets and a fun throw­away bit where Dalton has an elec­tri­fied prong con­trap­tion rigged to his lamp to cook hot­dogs.  The story is also laced with eccen­tric bits of humor, like a mob­ster com­plain­ing about the state of mod­ern comic strips and the unique insult Dalton uses to tell off a gov­ern­ment spook.

That said, even grind­house fans should be warned that the film has some odd touches that might throw them off: for instance, there are oddly abrupt tran­si­tions through­out the film, the most notable being an auda­cious jump-cut that takes the story from John giv­ing Michael’s wife the bad news about her husband’s con­di­tion to John inter­ro­gat­ing a gang mem­ber (who we’ve never seen before) to get info on the gang.  They’re jar­ring at first but soon become part of the nar­ra­tive design — and they add to the weirdly dream­like, ran­dom qual­ity of John’s search for vengeance.

There’s also a roman­tic sub­plot for Dalton with a doc­tor (Samantha Eggar) that seems shoe­horned in to pro­vide a roman­tic inter­est ele­ment that we don’t get in John’s sto­ry­line.  That said, it serves as a way to compare/contrast Dalton and John.  Dalton has a warmth and abil­ity to reach out to oth­ers that John lacks — yet both were sol­diers and Dalton finds him­self oddly respect­ing his sense of duty.   It’s also worth not­ing that this sub­plot gives the audi­ence a breather between shocks.

These unortho­dox touches are just a small part of what makes this film such a one-of-a-kind expe­ri­ence.  A big part of what makes The Exterminator so dis­tinc­tive is the detached, almost clin­i­cal approach Glickenhaus takes to his mate­r­ial.  It has the manip­u­la­tive hooks of a revenge movie but we never get the sense that there is a chance for the hero to achieve jus­tice or even redemp­tion.  A key moment involves John con­fess­ing to his par­a­lyzed friend that he didn’t ago­nize over killing his attack­ers, he just did it. As the open­ing cred­its song eerily intones over soft coun­try music: “I had to heal it/‘Til I couldn’t feel it…”

As a result, The Exterminator starts to feel like a down-and-dirty, grind­house take on Taxi Driver as it pro­gresses, with John serv­ing as our Travis Bickle.  If that sounds strange, con­sider this list of ele­ments the two films share: an alien­ated war-vet hero being dri­ven over the edge by NYC squalor, darkly comic vignettes of street peo­ple ban­ter­ing with (and tak­ing advan­tage of) each other, a scene where the hero invades a pimp’s den to avenge a pros­ti­tute and a seem­ingly sui­ci­dal finale fol­lowed by bit­terly ironic “happy” end­ing.  The Exterminator isn’t a mir­ror image of Taxi Driver, nor does it try to be, but it’s easy to get the sense that Glickenhaus is draw­ing from the same well of urban alien­ation that inspired Paul Schrader and Martin Scorcese.

It’s also worth not­ing that Glickenhaus gets some sur­pris­ingly strong, method-style per­for­mances from a mix of vet­er­ans and up-and-comers here.  Prior to this film, Ginty was known bet­ter for work like The Paper Chase tele­vi­sion series than gritty exploita­tion mate­r­ial — and the fact that he’s not a con­ven­tional action hero fits the story’s pur­poses nicely.  With his hang­dog expres­sion and quiet Method actor inten­sity, he makes a dis­tinc­tive anti-hero.

George offers light to his shade as the cop hero: he was at the begin­ning of the final grindhouse-friendly stretch of his career and he applies an old pro’s charm to his work here.  Eggar doesn’t get much to do but she adds a touch of class.  The var­i­ous crooks and street peo­ple are played broadly but that serves the “urban night­mare” angle of the plot well: Dick Boccelli is par­tic­u­larly enter­tain­ing as a loqua­cious mob­ster and the gang is loaded with up-and-coming char­ac­ter actors like Dennis Boutsikaris and Ned Eisenberg.

In sum­ma­tion, The Exterminator per­fectly fits the grind­house genre in con­tent yet it stands apart from the pack because it has a voice and an unusual set of rhythms all its own.  If Your Humble Reviewer had to make a list of the top five must-sees from this style of film­mak­ing, this film would def­i­nitely be on there.