PHENOMENALITY: *uncanny*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTIONS: *psychological, sociological*
Most “urban vigilante” films of the seventies and eighties don’t venture into the realm of the metaphenomenal, given that they’re dealing with grim-faced men and women meting out vengeance upon the criminal scum of the big cities. EXTERMINATOR and its sequel, however, manage to edge their way into the domain of the uncanny, though not in precisely the same ways.
The first film, an early writer-director effort by action-film specialist James Glickenhaus, focuses upon the travails of traumatized Vietnam vet John Eastland (Robert Ginty) as he seeks to cope with his return to blue-collar employment in New York. He and his fellow vet Jefferson work at a meat-packing plant, but both of them soon find themselves facing a new kind of war, caught (to recycle a phrase I used elsewhere recently) between callous “haves” and brutal “have nots.” Noxious gang-punks attack Eastland and Jefferson, and in the melee Jefferson is crippled. Eastland then decides to avenge Jefferson by hunting down all the members of the gang. In addition, to pay for Jefferson’s hospital care and for his expenses as “the Exterminator,” Eastland also begins robbing more affluent mobsters as well. By the end of the film he’s even an implicit threat to corruption in high places.
Since the successful paperback series “The Executioner” had been booming since 1969, it’s not unlikely that Glickenhaus and his team sought to capture some of the same “men’s adventure” vibe, crossbred with the “crazed Vietnam vet in dog-eat-dog New York” trope popularized by 1976’s TAXI DRIVER. The first two-thirds of EXTERMINATOR succeed in this synthesis, though the story loses some steam when Eastland finds himself pursued by a CIA investigator (Christopher George). Usually in serials devoted to similar urban avengers, the protagonists must face off against exceptional opponents from the underworld. If the producers intended some political statement with the CIA plot-thread, it didn’t work well.
As bad as New York is, the Exterminator proves a greater scourge. In the film’s standout scene, Eastland chains a mob-boss so as to suspend him over a huge meat-grinding machine to get information—and when the mobster gives Eastland false intel, the criminal gets turned into dog chow. Surprisingly, an image from the film’s marketing—that of the hero brandishing a flamethrower to incinerate criminals—disturbed countess liberals with its implication that the lower classes deserved to be wiped out like insects, but this never occurs in the film proper. Eastland threatens to torture a gang-member with an acetylene torch, but he never actually turns the weapon on that man or anyone else. Once or twice, the script equivocates about whether the Exterminator is a proper hero. After a grueling scene in which three punks rob and abuse an elderly woman, the punks run off, and the Exterminator only arrives in time to see a passerby trying to help the old lady. Eastland threatens the hapless fellow with his pistol, but rather conveniently, doesn’t lose audience support by rashly blowing the innocent man away. Throughout the film Eastland wears only ordinary clothes and never hides his face, but his more extreme actions mark him as a “perilous psycho” of the uncanny variety.
EXTERMINATOR 2 falls more squarely into the superhero idiom, insofar as Eastland is often seen stalking the streets, wearing a heavy work-suit and concealing his face behind a welding-mask, while wielding his flamethrower against criminal scum. (It would seem that the objections of liberal viewers only encouraged the producers to make greater use of the offending weapon.) This time the film was directed by the first entry’s producer Mark Buntzman and co-written by Buntzman and William Sachs. The latter alleged that he and Buntzman made greater use of the welding-mask because star Robert Ginty wasn’t available for reshoots. Whatever the reason, the use of the “costume” does place more emphasis on Eastland as “urban superhero” and less on his status as “crazed Vietnam vet.”
Fittingly enough, the Exterminator gets his own “super-villain” this time, in the form of gang-leader X (Mario Van Peebles). In an early scene, the flame-throwing vigilante executes a gangbanger who happens to be X’s brother. From then on, X and his motley crew devote themselves to hunting down the Exterminator and anyone aiding him. Buntzman and Sachs place far less emphasis on urban blight than did Glickenhaus, so that the effect is somewhat closer to a wild romp like THE WARRIORS, particularly in the climactic scene, pitting the voluble, athletic X against the heavily-clad, slow-moving spawn of the Vietnam conflict. As Ginty gets far fewer strong acting scenes in this installment, the villain’s charisma usually exceeds the hero’s—though I should remark that in most of his later works I’ve had no high opinion of Van Peebles’ thespian abilities.
The sequel didn’t make as much money as the original, and that, rather than any liberal rage, resulted in the swift extermination of this series.
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