The Exterminator (1980)

What a slimy turd snaking itself out of the b-grade asshole that fell into my lap this evening. Plot holes you could drive your car through, horrible acting, massive amounts of ridiculousness and sleaze and anold Italian stereotype lowered into a meat grinder. Basically this stonefaced feather haired dude serves in Vietnam with his pal who saves his life (“That nigger was my best friend”) after the Charlie takes a machete to a GI’s neck, admittedly resulting in a very impressive beheading. Fast forward to America and they work packing trucks together. His mate gets roughed up by some street gang who have the unbelievably non-threatening handle of the Ghetto Ghouls and our hero gets revenge. Featherhead develops a taste for killing criminals and suddenly a new dawn rises over New York City as pimps, mobsters and gangsters are getting rubbed out left right and centre. Obviously a grizzled detective who has seen too much gets put on the case but he’s pretty sympathetic to what’s going down. Okay, what did I like about this stinker? First things first I have a soft spot for 70s/80s genre fare set in New York. Everything always looks so gritty and dirty and a hundred times more atmospheric then a movie set. This gets exploited in this with mucho scene of Feathers walking past 25 cent porno stores and strip clubs. Like always I couldn’t help thinking about the hardcore bands floating around New York at this point and musing over the universe they existed in and how this dirty and rough city shaped the music and image of this scene. Speaking of New York, I think David Berkowitz edited this movie because scenes jump all over the place, are barely strung together and alot of the time shit just doesn’t make sense. I’m not even sure why or how a lot of what happens. Also the lead is pretty infuriating because its not that the man can’t act, it’s that he wont act. I guess if you can’t do something, don’t try, its always worked for me. The dude has the same face and the same voice for every situation in this movie from torturing gang members, turning off his friends life support, telling his friends wife her husband died, being threatened with beheading by the Viet Cong. Now I think about it, he might not of been human but an elaborate puppet. The sleaze hits a few notches of spiciness at times as well. An example is a scene where a prostitute is tortured by heaving her breasts burnt with a soldering iron because she wouldn’t whack on a strap on and fuck a dude in the ass while he fucks a boy in the ass. Yeah. I’m going to cut this review short because it’s hard to write logically about a movie that existed in an illogical universe so I’m going to say that I like 80s action movies because it’s so obvious they want to make right wing gun dudes jizz in their slacks and I can feel that.