I never really seen the charm or entertainment value in James Glickenhaus The Exterminator, except for the fun - but sloppily shot - beginning, set in Vietnam….or at least in the “wilderness” outside LA or somewhere else. The rest is pretty boring Glickenhaus has far from the talent he showed is in his follow-up production The Soldier (which still is an awesome movie!) and many other films over the years. Somehow someone got Robert Ginty to repeat his role as John Eastland in Exterminator 2, and this time the big cheese was roooooollin’ in!
John is still doing his job in the streets, randomly burning criminals in dark alleys. He meets a woman, a dancer, and when she’s attacked and severely beaten until she loses the ability to dance (and I think she later also commits suicide, but that’s a bit unclear) John takes out his flame thrower for the millionth time and hunts down X (Mario Van Peebles, in full scene-chewing mode!) and his gang and kills them one by one! He also gets some help from his trusty friend Be Gee (the excellent Frankie Faison, which we’ve seen in almost all Hannibal Lecter films) and his awesome - and lethal - garbage truck!
There’s so many things with Exterminator 2 I want to bring up, but I also realize that it’s not fun hearing anyone retelling a joke, so I recommend you all to just get this movie - uncut - and watch it. Shout Factory have released it in a cheap set with three other films, so that should get you started on cheesy eighties action cinema. Anyway, this is fucking sloppy filmmaking - and I love it. For me it’s just proof there’s humans behind the camera and not fascist, pedantic swines. Here it borders to absurdity when there’s one scene where the camera man obviously can’t follow the actors, Robert Ginty and Deborah Geffner when they sit down, and desperately tries to fix the problem without doing another take. Another scene is obviously made up afterwards, in the editing room - and they uses an outtake of Ginty when he actually stops acting and starts to laugh. It’s almost surreal, that whole sequences - sometime that Woody Allen’s Val would have done during his blind state in the 2002 comedy Hollywood Ending.
It’s always easy to laugh at goofs, but they’re just part of being a human, what’s more impressive with Exterminator 2 is how they, considering the very thin script, is keeping up the pace and delivers quite a lot of entertainment. Sure, there’s some scenes drawn out in absurdity (like X’s speech and the love scene between Ginty and Geffner), probably because they had to make the movie come up in a certain length - these scenes becomes fun just because of that. But in-between there’s a lot of action, impressive stunts, some blood and creative deaths and sometimes very stylish and cool directing by Buntzman. He manages to capture both the grittiness of the big city, and make it a typical, visual eighties action feast with strong colors, wide angle shots over gorgeous rundown locations and an healthy use of slow-motion.
Exterminator 2 isn’t a good film. It’s a great film and it knows it’s entertaining. Ginty is bored and the baddies looks like a bunch of gay hipsters (like me, but only if I was in the right age during the eighties). Yeah gay, which reminds me of another scene where a gangster seems to be flirting with one of X’s gang members, or at least he seems a little bit to fond of him for his own good. And his comes from nowhere and then disappears to nowhereland. Odd, to say the least. But cool. Check it out, it’s during the breakdance scene (Yeah, I know you will LOVE this film!) and the gangster watches it.
Alright, I need to stop raving here: this film made me get into such a good mood I think I can survive on it the whole weekend! That’s nice, very nice!
"I never really seen the charm or entertainment value in James Glickenhaus The Exterminator,"
It could have been better but......there you have it.
"(the excellent Frankie Faison, which we’ve seen in almost all Hannibal Lecter films)"
One of the few people Lecter seems to respect......
"Another scene is obviously made up afterwards, in the editing room - and they uses an outtake of Ginty when he actually stops acting and starts to laugh. It’s almost surreal, that whole sequences - sometime that Woody Allen’s Val would have done during his blind state in the 2002 comedy Hollywood Ending."
There have been near blind directors and....DPs running around on movie sets.
But the idea of even including scnes like that.......hahhaahahahhah...it worked for Gillo Pontecorvo in Queimada/Burn! (1969) so what the hell......
"But cool. Check it out, it’s during the breakdance scene (Yeah, I know you will LOVE this film!) and the gangster watches it."
hahahahhahahha...wait.....gangsters, breakdance, gayflirting...hahhahahhahah...someone must have been high during the production of this film.
"Alright, I need to stop raving here: this film made me get into such a good mood I think I can survive on it the whole weekend! That’s nice, very nice!"
I haven´t seen it....but it sure does sound fun......good review and thanks.
Posted by: Megatron | September 28, 2014 at 00:42