"The Exterminator" Comes Home on Cable TV

Released: 1980

Director: James Glickenhaus

Writer: James Glickenhaus

Starring: Robert Ginty, Christopher George, Samantha Eggar, Steve James

“Go get your toy."

My first exposure to a true grindhouse film was The Exterminator.  It was mean, grim, and shocking.  And I saw it in my pajamas.

It’s hard to imagine now, but back in the ‘70s and early ‘80s, the only way to watch an uncut movie in your own home was through something called cable TV.

And we didn’t have it.

It’s not like my family decided to cut the cord; cable wasn’t available in my hometown.   Literally.   I lived only 15 miles outside of Manhattan and yet the cable – the one from whence cable TV gets its name – had not been strung as far as Cranford, NJ.

My god, how old am I?

True, the first videocassette players were just hitting the market in the ‘70s, but they were outrageously expensive.   Like, car down payment pricey.

There was also a service in the NYC area called Wometco Home Theater, which, kinda brilliantly, sent a scrambled signal over the public airwaves, by sub-licensing a UHF channel at night.   Wometco showed a single movie per day, in an early and a late showing, and the descrambler box cost more per month than we now pay for Netflix.  And that’s in 40 years ago dollars.

So, to put a finer point on it, there was no way FOR ME to watch a movie unedited at home.

Sometimes, when I was really bored, I’d watch the scrambled Wometco signal on channel 68 and try to guess what movie they were showing that night.  And hope to see boobies…

This is what happens when you have only three networks to choose from.

As I entered my senior year in high school, something miraculous happened.  Cable finally reached our suburb. 

From the moment that 75-ohm coaxial video cable was screwed into the back of our Sylvania console television, I watched whatever movie was on, whenever I had the chance. 

Due to the vagaries of cable programming, this often meant seeing the same movie again and again.  Not because it was spectacularly entertaining, but because it was... Always.  Fucking.  On.   (…All The Marbles, I’m looking at you!)

However, there are two movies that I watched over and over again on purpose: Cutter's Way and The Exterminator.

Cutter's Way is an amazingly well acted and heartbreaking drama.  The Exterminator is a stone cold slice of sleaze.

The fact that The Exterminator existed, and was picked up by HBO to play in living rooms across the country, blew my little mind.  I became kind of obsessed with it.

Despite my fondness for it, The Exterminator is a difficult film to defend.

Its themes are recycled from other, better films.  Many of the characters, including our titular protagonist, are unsympathetic.  And much of the film is ugly in both look and content.

In fact, the film’s main strength is that it just GOES FOR IT.  It owns what it is and doesn’t give a fuck how that plays to your notions of a good time at the movies.

It is the quintessential F'dup Flick.

Okay, you remember when I said I couldn’t defend this flick?  (Seriously?!  It was only a few paragraphs ago.  Sigh.)  Anyway, here’s where I defend this flick.

Maybe “justify” is a better word.  “Rationalize”?   How about “explain”?  Anyway, hear me out…

First, the good…

Despite an underwritten role, Robert Ginty’s performance as John Eastman is very compelling. He plays the character as a broken man from the first frames of the film, tossed around by mortar shells and events beyond his control.  In calmer moments, he seems always on the verge of an insight to which he can’t quite give voice.

His interactions with friends and loved ones reek of play-acting for the sake of others – “You okay?” “Yeah.  Sure.” – and much of his dialog is banally direct: “Let’s take a walk, Maria…Michael was mugged.”  “Sit down, Maria…Michael is dead.”

Paul Kersey, in Death Wish, is a hero.  Eastman is an anti-hero and Ginty does a great job making us question if we even like him, let alone want to be like him.

Visually, director James Glickenhaus struts his low budget action skills early, with the (obviously not shot in) Vietnam opener, filled with moody darkness, hypnotic slow-mo, and endlessly curling fireballs.

Despite the occasional visual flourish, Glickenhaus never loses sight of the dark tone he wants for this film.

An early example occurs during the war sequence.  After an intense firefight, fellow soldiers Eastman and Michael Jefferson are captured and tortured.   Eventually, they are able to turn the tables on their Viet Cong captors, but not before Eastman cracks and gives useful intel to the VC leader.

Only a few minutes in and already the audience is faced with an understandable yet challenging development.  Can Eastman really be a hero when he has just compromised US Army operations?

Glickenhaus quickly pushes our unease with our protagonist even further.

Michael is able to get a gun away from his captors and kills all of the enemy soldiers, except for the VC leader, who is only wounded.  Then, he cuts Eastman free to finish the job.

There’s no question how this scene will end; Eastman must kill the VC leader…for many reasons: he is the enemy, he knows too much, and because…well, he is an asshole.

But rather than play the sequence for all its “git some, git some” glory, Glickenhaus locks the camera down and simply observes the two men in one, long take.  As Eastman slowly preps his gun in the background, the bleeding VC leader desperately crawls away in the foreground.

The shot goes on and on.  The longer it does, the more pathetic the VC leader’s doomed escape attempt becomes.  You want this nasty business to be over with quickly but instead we watch this man flail and suffer…and be human.

Finally, the men look at each other and Eastman shoots the VC leader.  No anger, no righteousness, no punny catchphrase.  Nothing.

Drained of any emotional charge or catharsis, the moment leaves one feeling vaguely unsettled.   Hooray?

Later in the film, Eastman perfectly describes this pervasive sense of unease.  

The war over, Eastman and Michael find themselves home in NYC, where they run afoul of some punks.  Predictably, the gang cripple Michael, and Eastman must hunt them down and kill them.

After he’s had his vengeance, Eastman describes how it felt to his paralyzed friend: “It was like we were back in 'nam.  It didn’t matter if it was right or wrong, I just did it.”

Like it or not, that is the tone for the entire film.  It is beyond right and wrong.  It is amoral.  Fatalistic.  Nihilistic…

So, obviously there is some level of thought and, dare I say, artistry at work here.  But if we are honest, the reason why the film lingers in the memory isn’t because of its craft.  It is because of a long and repugnant subplot set in Times Square.

By the midway point of the story, Eastman has killed every bad guy we’ve met, as well as a guard dog, in increasingly brutal ways.  Now what?  There are still 45 minutes to go.

And here’s where the film makes a radical left turn.  Instead of the previous line-up of comfortably clichéd gangbangers and Mafioso types, Eastman’s next prey are frighteningly realistic sexual sadists.   Not just bad guys, but men so evil that you didn’t even know there were names for the things they do.

In a 20-minute tutorial on hell, Glickenhaus teaches us the names. 

The really bad stuff happens at “chicken places.”  The men who run them are called “chicken hawks.” And the “chicken” are young boys who have been sold into sexual slavery.

Glickenhaus even reserves a special, satirical name for one of the loathsome perverts who frequents the chicken place: “The State Senator from New Jersey”.  (Being from NJ, I smirk at that line every time.)

The whole enterprise runs like a misery machine, destroying people while stacking Benjamins, and Eastman’s reaction to it is equally mechanical. 

In a long and wordless sequence, before the inevitable siege and rescue, we watch as Eastman calmly makes his own hollow-tip bullets: place the bullet in a vise, drill a hole into the lead, place a drop of poisonous mercury into the hole, balance a couple of rods of solder over the tip, and heat with a blow torch. 

In other words, a tutorial bookend.  For every action, an equal and opposite reaction.

Here, I must give a special shout out to Christopher Brenner the actor who plays the “chicken boy” (so named in the end credits) rescued by Eastman.   Although onscreen for only a minute, Brenner’s non-verbal performance is so vulnerable, so beyond terrified, that you start to wonder if the filmmakers actually did kidnap and force him to appear in the film.

If IMDb is correct, Brenner never made another movie after this.  Chris, if you are still out there, I want you to know that you either gave a stunning performance…or I am so very sorry.

As you can see, this whole sequence is a steaming hot plate of WTF?   So, why watch a movie like this at all, let alone multiple times?

Here’s what you need to understand.  When I was growing up, northern New Jersey lived in the shadow of Manhattan.  On a clear day, I could see the World Trade Center towers from my street.  Our TV stations came out of New York, our newspapers came out of New York, our culture came out of New York.

Yet, we almost never went INTO New York.

New York was great, but New York was dangerous.  Every news report said so, every TV movie said so.  Even if you dared venture into New York, for a baseball game or the Ice Capades, you never, ever went to Times Square.  Except, maybe, on New Year’s Eve...

NO!  Not even on New Year’s Eve!

Everything that was wrong with New York – with the world – could be found in Times Square. 

Whatever that meant…

And then I saw The Exterminator.  And I understood.

In a way, films like this are like the works of the Marquis de Sade.  They go so far beyond titillation, into revulsion, that your reaction to it becomes the message.  

“Look at what people do to each other.  It is fucked up, no?  Ah well… Goodnight, now.  Sleep tight.”

But as you lie there in your jammies, in the comfort of your suburban home, trying to make sense of what you just saw, the questions start coming:

Is that stuff about chicken places for real?
How does one deal with evil like that?
Is a vigilante a good guy or just as messed up as the bad guys?
Who made this fucked up film?

I find questions like this fascinating.  Perhaps you prefer Friends.

By their very nature, grindhouse films are confrontational.  You watch them to have your notions of reality and morality challenged.   And by challenged, I mean dragged out into the street and thrashed to within an inch of their lives.

It used to be that you actually had to go to Times Square to see a depiction of 42nd Street as harrowing as this.   Who knew that once cable TV came to my home, it would bring Times Square along with it?

Footnotes:

1. The pictures on this page are screengrabs from the DVD in the Synapse Films Unrated Director's Cut Blu-ray/DVD combo pack, which can be purchased here.  The photos are heavily compressed and do not represent the actual PQ of this release.