2010 In Pictures #7

The Exterminator (1980)
Dir: James Glickenhaus

The reputation of this James Glickenhaus film, at least to me who has only just caught up with this delightfully sleazy piece of post-grindhouse exploitation cinema, has been sketched out as that of a cheap Death Wish knock-off. Which is wildly unfair, given the tone, atmosphere and peculiar poise Glickenhaus lends both his screenplay and the direction of his performers.

Like William Lustig’s Vigilante -- and more importantly very *unlike* Michel Winner’s more coldly punitive Death Wish -- there's a begrudging love of New York here. Winner has a foreigner’s detachment which screams like a tabloid headline whereas The Exterminator and Vigilante possesses the weary deference to violence as a way of life, something to be rallied against at the cost of a man’s soul rather than his quest for simple blood vengeance. This what is drives these latter "knock offs".

It’s something Glickenhaus’s film shares with its more overt forebear: John Flynn’s Rolling Thunder. There, too, a man who was once demonstrably human has returned from Vietnam a virtual automaton, his moral compass skewed so that his primary mode of behaviour is a terrifyingly measured, primal and, most chilling of all, *lucid* defense of his fellow citizens at the mercy of the ruthless, avaricious and plain wicked. There’s even a yearning country ballad (reprised, bizarrely but just as hauntingly in The Ninth Configuration) that's evocative of a happier, simpler and more heartfelt era, accompanying the opening credits.

The Exterminator is the best kind of reactionary cinema. Sombre and sorrowful nihilism without resorting to tabloid didacticism to make its points.