How grim New York used to be

glenn-aylett

This is a vigilante film about New York, part of a trend that was started by Death Wish in 1974. Basically the plot concerns a warehouse worker in New York who served in Vietnam named John Eastland whose best friend and fellow Vietnam veteran is paralysed by a gang of thugs when he disturbs them breaking into a warehouse. Swearing revenge, Eastland wipes out the gang members that paralysed his friend, then decides to take on a gangster who is extorting money from the warehouse( he is killed horrifically by being dropped into a meat mincer) and a child abuse gang that involves a senator and then wiping out a group of violent muggers who are part of the same gang that paralysed Eastland's best friend.

While a bit cheaply made and unsettling in places, The Exterminator shows what a dirty, dangerous place New York was 35 years ago. Unlike now, where Times Square is a lively and safe pedestrianised square, in 1980 it was full of pimps, prostitutes and drug dealers and one scene shows Eastland in a squalid hotel used by prostitutes asking a prostitute who has been tortured by the child abuse gang for more information. Also Eastland's neighbourhood is full of semi derelict and dangerous tenement blocks that are often rat infested, the rats coming in useful when Eastland ties two members of the Ghetto Ghouls gang up and lets the rats attack them.

Unlike now, and something the film alludes to constantly, NYC is a

dirty and crime ridden city and run by a corrupt and aloof city government which believes The Exterminator, as Eastland now styles himself, is a plot by their political opponents to bring them down. In the final part of a film, the mayor and the CIA decide to try and wipe out The Exterminator, but he manages to escape being shot and swims away to freedom from an abandoned ship where he has arranged a rendezvous with the detective that is investigating him.

I quite like The Exterminator, even if many critics savaged it for being too violent, and think it was very much of its time when New York was a frightening place to live and the police and city government were ineffective and corrupt.

score 8/10

glenn-aylett 18 October 2015

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3337596/