The Exterminator (

1980

)

Vigilante films are regularly branded as being right-wing, reactionary, or even basically fascistic. While this is fair enough some of the time, Death Wish (1977), for instance, has a deliberately conservative message, it seems a bit ridiculous to make a blanket statement about the genre. The fantasy being sold by vigilante movies is one that appeals to a lot of different kinds of people. You don't have to belong to any particular political or ideological group to want violent criminals to be killed or imprisoned for their violent crimes. Indeed, one of the primary advantages of living in a civilization as opposed to Hobbes' state of nature is that psychotic scumbags will be disposed of properly. It's doubly absurd to argue that it is a deranged position held only by a pack of goose-stepping lunatics who are looking for an excuse to open up Auschwitz II. Indeed, this line of argument only serves to make that failed totalitarian ideology and its adherents seem more reasonable and sympathetic. Nobody wants to walk down a city street late at night, worrying about being mugged, and if only the Nazis are willing to address this issue, then the Nazis alone would benefit. Besides, as today's movie demonstrates, it's possible to make a vigilante movie with a more complex and subversive message, and these movies need to be evaluated on their own merits and not be tossed aside because of catchy political slogans.

Most vigilante movies tend to treat the matter of crime-prevention rather simply: IE, there are violent criminals causing problems who, for one reason or another, are not being dealt with properly by the authorities. Once they are killed (or imprisoned if you're dealing with a usually bleeding heart vigilante), then the matter is resolved. To be fair, sometimes it really is that simple; see the plummeting crime rate in El Salvador following the controversial new policy of imprisoning gangsters. However, most vigilante movies ignore the fact that organized crime of all varieties generates a lot of money, and that this money can wind up in the hands of unscrupulous individuals on the right side of the law. Indeed, if the corruption is advanced enough, the lines between those tasked with upholding the law and those breaking it could become blurred. Some, otherwise law-abiding figures, will look the other way if only to protect themselves from the fact that they are profiting off of human misery. If it is bad enough, then the system may just close ranks around its criminal members rather than risk a scandal that could bring them all down. What do you do when crime and criminality have wormed their way into the system so deeply and so profoundly that the very organs of the state meant to uphold the law are weaponized against those who would seek justice? That's the question The Exterminator asks, and it answers with a rather pitiful: “Fake your death and run away because there's no way a lone vigilante with un-diagnosed PTSD is going to stand much chance against the CIA.” Depressing, sure, but probably accurate.

I'm getting ahead of myself, because for the first act of the film, The Exterminator is going to mostly avoid politics. Sure, there is a mob boss who complains about all the money he has to funnel to Washington DC, to keep himself one step ahead of the feds, but the film will remain stridently apolitical until it goes all in during its third act. Indeed, even the film's opening flashback to Vietnam establishes nothing of political significance save that the war happened, our protagonist John Eastland fought in it, and that his life was saved by his best friend Michael Jefferson.

Though it has little bearing on the plot of the movie beyond that terse description, I would be remiss if I didn't say a few words of praise for this sequence, as it seems to have swallowed up nearly all of the film's production budget. It is a stunning opening set piece, and easily the most complicated and sophisticated action sequence in the entire film. We have explosions lighting up the darkness of night, we have helicopters whizzing around through the blasts, and we have the most convincing decapitation I have ever seen committed to film! Indeed, the dummy is so good that director James Glickenhaus boasts in the commentary track that he doesn't know if the credited actor was ever onscreen in the final cut. It is certainly an effective way of grabbing the viewer's attention, even if it could have easily been replaced with a text crawl.

After the war, John and Michael go to work at a food distribution center, loading and unloading groceries from the trucks that come. One day, a bunch of Cuban (I'm guessing at this only because their leader wears a beret and their headquarters has a poster of Che Guevara) punks try to rob the warehouse, and Michael kicks their teeth in with a little help from John. The Cubans come back for revenge, ambushing Michael and beating him until he is permanently paralyzed. This makes John snap, so he catches one of them, interrogates him with a flamethrower until he fesses up about the location of their clubhouse. John then marches into the joint with an M16, scares off their girlfriends, and then executes the lot of them.

The logic of this sequence is a bit hazy, with there being no shots whatsoever of John preparing or gearing up for this. He goes from looking upset about Michael in the hospital immediately to a scene where one of the thugs is tied up, and he already has the flamethrower trained on him. It gives the film an odd, almost surreal atmosphere, like we're no longer watching objective events in the film's world and instead are seeing John's deranged fantasies play out.

The next sequence is, if anything, even stranger, though it begins to take on an almost comedic tone. John decides that Michael's family will need money, so he kidnaps a mob boss. This is fine in and of itself, but John opts to do this by hiding in a trash can in the men's room of the restaurant where said mob boss is having dinner. We don't see John arrive in the restroom or get into the trash can; we only see him get out when the mobster is using the facilities. How did John know that the mobster was going to go to this particular restaurant for dinner? More importantly (and funnier), how long was he waiting in that bin? In any event, he drugs the mobster with a syringe and drags him out the window.

When the mobster comes to, he is in an abandoned factory, dangling above an industrial-sized meat grinder. He also somehow knows that his bodyguards and his wife not only aren't looking for him but have skipped town without him. The implication here is that he just assumes that if he ever goes somewhere for an afternoon without telling anyone, he knows for certain that all the people closest to him will abandon him. I understand that trust is a commodity that guys in his line of work can ill afford, but seriously, man, you need to hire some better help or at least marry a wife that likes you.

In any event, John says he'll be happy to let the mobster go, provided he can fork over a big pile of cash. Our mob boss has just such a bundle in the safe in his mansion, and he says that John is welcome to it. Naturally, we're not going to dangle a man over a meat grinder and not turn him into sausages, so the mobster leaves out the fact that the house and the safe are protected by a vicious attack dog. The canine lives up to its title and almost kills John when he goes to collect the money, but John gets away with the cash and goes back to send the mafioso into the grinder. Sure, I know that it's just regular hamburger meat coming out the other end, but the scene is still gruesome nonetheless.

Unlike other vigilantes of the period, John demonstrates almost no ideological opposition to crime. He killed the Cubans at the beginning because they crippled his best friend, and he kidnapped and robbed the mob boss specifically to get his money. He confesses that he enjoys doing these things because it reminds him of the life and death situations he was forced into during the Vietnam War, and presumably, he's only targeting criminals because they are an acceptable group to hurt. This makes him a far more troubling and frightening character than your usual vigilante, though at times his motivations will become more palatable. Indeed, the audience is never on John's side quite so much as when he decides to target a pimp and his rich pedophile client after he learns about how the pair tortured a hooker after she refused to help them perform illicit acts on a boy. It's the scummiest and most exploitative scene in an all-around scummy and exploitative movie.

It's at this point that we see John drilling into some of his bullets and filling them with mercury before closing them back up by melting a bit of lead over the hole. The scene evokes the sequence in Jaws 2 (1978) when Sheriff Brody fills rounds of his service revolver with poison. However, just because the two films have some superficial similarities, it seems doubtful that the two protagonists are motivated by the same thought process. Brody is worried that he will have to kill a massive animal that will be able to shrug off his small-caliber handgun bullets. He needs the poison to have a chance of bringing down his adversary. John, on the other hand, just wants to shoot a bunch of scumbags, rapists, and murderers, and honestly, a .45 is more than sufficient for that task. Moreover, while mercury is certainly something that is bad for people, it's not exactly a fast-acting poison. Indeed, it is about as toxic as the lead that the bullets are already made out of!

At first, I really wasn't sure what the filmmakers were getting at with this scene. It's obviously not anything based in reality because I found a video online that shows an enthusiast making his own mercury-tipped bullets with a similar method, and demonstrating that they functioned almost identically to the unaltered bullets, albeit slightly worse in most ways. Was the idea that the mercury would make the bullets shatter more effectively on impact? If that's the case, why not use simple hollow points? Or was the filmmaker's idea to give John the semi-automatic equivalent of Severian's mercurial great-sword Terminus Est from The Book of the New Sun? If that was the idea, then I can't even begin to describe how stupid, misguided, and hilarious it is.

Fortunately, after a bit of digging, I found the real explanation behind this bizarre scene. Evidentially, James Glickenhaus is a fan of The Day of the Jackal (1973) or the novel it's based on. In that story, an assassin plans to kill the French president Charles De Gaulle, and due to a variety of constraints, he can only use a small caliber .22 rifle for the job. In order to make the small bullets more deadly, he has his gunsmith tip the bullets with mercury fulminate, a highly reactive substance that will make the bullets explosive. A key issue should jump out at everyone who paid attention in high school chemistry: Mercury is not the same thing as mercury fulminate. A mercury fulminate bullet probably would explode on impact (if it didn't explode in the chamber first, personally, you couldn't pay me enough to fire a gun loaded with this ammunition), a mercury bullet is just a shittier version of the same bullet.

Anyway, I can't complain too much about this absurdity, because once he's loaded up with mercury bullets, John goes and blasts the pimp and his pederast client that we saw torture that poor hooker in the previous scene, and rescues the imprisoned sex slave. The sequence culminates with John blowing a grapefruit-sized hole into the pedophile. Hell yeah! There's one downside, though, said pedophile isn't just some pervert, he's a very highly-placed pervert, a state senator from New Jersey to be specific. His death really calls down the thunder on poor John, and this is where the political messaging of The Exterminator becomes undeniable.

It's not just that the elites we see have ties to the mob, or are fucking underage hookers in Times Square flophouses either. Scumbags exist at all levels of society, and the only practical difference between a rich bastard and a poor one is how easily they can get their kicks. No, the bigger issue is the reflexive and unthinking way that the system moves in to cover for even its crummiest members. It's not a problem that a state senator is a criminal pervert, the shadowy G-man called in to clean up this mess implies; what matters is that his criminality is being dragged into the light, and during an election year no less! Clearly, the vigilante responsible for this needs to be eliminated before he can shine any more light on the misdeeds of his social betters.

This is not a political message that is exclusive to the right or left wing politics, and tellingly, the specifics of this film are all left unsaid. There is no specific group or political party at fault for the corruption on display here. Instead, the message is simpler and more elemental: There are plenty of people in power who don't give a damn about right or wrong but are overly concerned with not looking bad. If their reputation is enhanced by running interference for monsters rather than bringing them to light, they will hide the monsters without a second thought. It's a unique, and surprisingly complex take on the issues in a genre that other than a few luminaries (Death Wish (1977) and Dirty Harry (1971) spring to mind) is often the domain of extremely silly and simplistic worldviews (as much as I love Cobra (1986) and Death Wish 3 (1985) they absolutely fall into this category).