The Exterminator (1980)

Having survived the war in Vietnam thanks to his buddy Michael Jefferson (Steve James), PTSD-suffering vet John Eastland (Robert Ginty) is now working with Jefferson in a meat-packing plant, leading the kind of life so empty, it might as well not be one.

One day, Jefferson and Eastland prevent some members of a multi-racial gang known as the Ghetto Ghouls from stealing some stuff from their workplace. Later, the young assholes attack Jefferson in revenge, nearly killing him and leaving him paralysed, which, given his race, social status and the US medical system, adds financial strain to the emotional one, too.

Eastland pretty much loses it completely and hunts down the Ghetto Ghouls, killing them in gruesome ways. This clearly does awaken something in him, and he starts with a one man crusade against crime he happens to stumble upon, like putting the mob boss responsible for the protection racket at his place of work into a meat grinder (and stealing his money to pay for Jefferson’s medical bill), or destroying a child prostitution ring.

This is obviously not the sort of thing a guy can get away with forever. Veteran police detective James Dalton (Christopher George), who will turn out to be another Vietnam vet nearly as damaged as Eastland, is on the case. When he is not romancing a doctor played by Samantha Eggar, that is. And, weirder, the CIA also shows an interest in Eastland’s “work”, deciding that his vigilante killing spree is either a conscious attempt to show up the current powers that be’s promise to lower crime rates, or some sort of foreign ploy, which must make total sense to someone. Clearly, things can’t end well.

And depending on the cut of the film, they don’t,though the finale of John Glickenhaus’s magnum opus The Exterminator turns out differently depending on which version of it you watch. My favourite ending sees everyone die in a classic 70s US cinema fashion very fitting to a film that stands so clearly right on the border between the sort of film typical of the 70s and what would become typical for the early 80s. Consequently, things are a bit of a peculiar, yet always interesting, mix of post-Watergate grimness and pre-Reagan love for violent solutions, Glickenhaus trying and mostly managing to make a vigilante movie that isn’t trying to be as reactionary as possible, simply by virtue of Glickenhaus not attempting to take any kind of moral stance towards Eastland’s actions.

Glickenhaus treats this a bit like a documentary filmmaker of the more “objective” sort, showing us Eastland, showing us why and how he does what he does but never really assuming the “fuck yeah” attitude of many action films. In fact, there’s really little action shot to excite in the film – most of the violence is grubby, unpleasant and looks deeply uncool (so probably pretty close to actual violence), Ginty stumbles from one violent encounter to the next not so much with an expression of rage than one of tired resignation on his face, really expressing more his own inner damage than any sentiments towards the people he kills. Which is particularly ironic because his victims are as vile as they come and would certainly lend themselves to some semi-effective screeds about how much they deserve what they get, and all the other crap vigilante films like to spout. The Exterminator as a film seems just as tired and empty in affect as its titular character, breathing an air of desperation more than one of the violent excitement that’ll usually make you a grindhouse hit (though it certainly turned out to be one).

Ginty, in general not one of my favourite low budget movie actors, is perfect as Eastland here, his air of slight distraction and empty normality perfect for a guy who has been damaged so much, he feels compelled to kill but clearly doesn’t even derive satisfaction from the act, going through the motions of violence because at least when he’s killing, he doesn’t have to think anymore.

Dalton’s scenes do at first feel like filler to get the film up to a decent runtime, but eventually, it becomes clear that Glickenhaus is really trying to show us another man with the same kind of damage, our protagonist and the man hunting him not being two sides of the same coin as is genre tradition, but virtually the same, only divided by the luck of the draw, because that’s what America is in this film: a place where everybody loses, only some worse than others.

On this cheery note, it’s no wonder that Glickenhaus also adds the CIA and elements of the 70s conspiracy thriller usually absent from vigilante movies to the mix, the politics that broke Eastland and Dalton in Vietnam (and that arguably also broke the America they are now living in) still churning on like the empty machines their lives have become.


Which is rather a lot of interesting subtext for a grubby, New York vigilante movie, and certainly what makes The Exterminator a jewel in the crown of this particular genre.

Past Misdeeds: Avenging Force (1986)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Former intelligence agent Matt Hunter (Michael Dudikoff) packs in his family - consisting of his grandfather (Rick Boyle) and his little sister Sarah (Allison Gereighty) - to visit his old secret ops partner Larry Richards (Steve James) and his family in New Orleans. Larry’s retired too, but apart from being a family man, he’s also running for senate, clearly on the sort of humanist platform that’ll get you labelled as a communist by quite a few people, particularly when the politician in question is a gentleman of colour like Larry.

So, despite being rather awesome, Larry has made enemies, in particular a secret society of rich fascists around Professor (who knows of what, though further proceedings suggest it has something to do with being evil) Elliott “Hitler was right” (actual quote) Glastenbury (John P. Ryan), who add to their evilness by having stolen their name from the seminal British folk rock band (The) Pentangle. Because Nazis are assholes, some of the groups’ henchmen attack a Mardi Gras parade Larry, Matt and their families take part in, murdering one of Larry’s children in the process.

Things don’t become more pleasant from there on in, and various attacks on our heroes eventually leave only Matt and Sarah alive. The Pentangle’s leaders have a hobby quite befitting their politics, and love to hunt The Most Dangerous Game™, so they “invite” Matt to take part in one of these hunts as their chosen victim. Which must have seemed like a good idea at the time; one suspects the Professor ignored the decidedly un-Aryan subject of hubris in his studies.

Quite surprising for the generally exploitative way Cannon and Golan-Globus chose their movies, they didn’t immediately follow up the success of American Ninja with a direct sequel. Instead, they put American Ninja’s leads Steve James and Michael Dudikoff and its director Sam Firstenberg to work on a film that does not contain any ninjas at all, but which otherwise does include pretty much everything else you’d expect from a low budget (though not that low budget) action film, except exploding huts. For reasons I don’t even want to ponder, this seems also to be meant as some sort of sequel to the Chuck Norris vehicle Invasion U.S.A., despite the only connection I can make out without having to watch a Chuck Norris (tied with Seagal as my least favourite US action movie lead) film, being Dudikoff’s character name, his job, and dead parents. And since all action movie heroes from the 80s are basically the same guy anyway, that’s not really enough to think of this as a sequel at all.

Instead of the ninjas, you get a film that works very, very hard to establish its heroes as the most awesome thing since sliced bread and its villains as the scum of the Earth, people who aren’t just Nazis (and just listen to how exactly the film actually hits the complete idiocy of right-wing “intellectuals” in Glastenbury’s speeches, probably without even having to try terribly hard), people who hunt others for sport, child killers, and probably puppy eaters, but also the kinds of guys who plan to sell Matt’s twelve year old sister into prostitution. Speaking of Nazis, it’s always a particular joy to find an 80s US action movie that uses them as its big bads instead of the more typical “Asian enemy of the day”, or “the Russians”, and I really appreciate the extra miles the film goes to turn its Nazis into proper cartoon villains while still keeping them perfectly in the correct spirit.

Of course, it would have been rather nice when, with the film’s heart placed on the left as it is, it would have made another step and not killed off James in your typical “black best friend in an action movie” style, particular since Steve James really is more charismatic, a less stiff actor, and also nicer to look at than Dudikoff, but then, we really can’t ask everything of what is only meant as basic action fodder.

Speaking of action, Firstenberg  was one of Cannon’s more dependable directors, not flashy but often able to rise above mere basic competence into the realm of the highly entertaining. In Avenging Force’s case this means there’s hardly a boring second on screen. Whenever nobody gets shot, spiked, strangled or otherwise killed, there’s a car chase, or a scene between Dudikoff and his sister that turns the emotional hysteria up to eleven (see also the imaginary chapter in my imaginary book about the action film as melodrama even when it doesn’t come from Hong Kong), or Steve James losing his shirt, with little that happens on screen having anything much to do with that pesky reality business, and instead everything aiming for the same kind of awesome kids of all ages get out of Power Metal. Best of all is that Firstenberg’s not just aiming at but hitting the mark in every scene, sometimes through the varied style of the action sequences, sometimes through the addition of little silly bits and pieces (a chase scene becomes something different once the chased bad guy puts on a straw hat, it turns out), clever application of atmospheric New Orleans and bayou locations (some of which were of course situated in LA), or outright ridiculous cheese like the costumes the Pentangle like to don during their chases. My favourite among the last is of course the wrestler gimp outfit.

On a more direct level of craft, I’m quite impressed with Firstenberg’s handling of escalation here. Instead of ever louder, higher in body count, and explosive, the action in Avenging Force becomes increasingly up close and personal, with shoot-outs and car chases in the end making place for grimy and dirty hand to hand struggles in the mud and the (excellently used) rain.


It’s all pretty inspiring stuff, really, at least as far as dumb yet affectionate entertainment goes; which is pretty far with me.

In short: McBain (1991)

I don’t believe James Glickenhaus actually knew about irony, not to speak of anything with the post prefix, so he presents this patently goofy transferral of his typical New York vigilante shtick into a Colombia just waiting to be freed from tyranny by some Vietnam vets under the leadership of Christopher Walken(!) as the titular McBain – also including Michael Ironside as their arms dealer frenemie who really needs to feel alive by shooting a lot of people again as well as Steve James for all your action movie needs - and the worst rebel army ever as sort of spearheaded by a Maria Chonchita Alonso who commits to her role with total earnestness. Every cheesy bit of revolutionary kitsch his script comes up with, every dubious speech about the very real horrors of dictatorship and the domination of one Simon Escobar (cough) is done with total conviction, as if the stuff these people spouted had any actual emotional impact.

For a Glickenhaus film, the whole affair is surprisingly awkwardly paced, partly because the film does want to tell an epic tale of Vietnam flashbacks, the death of a friend and the following revolution but only has 107 minutes time for it all instead of the three hours it would probably need to get serious. More curious, even a couple of the action sequences fall flat, perhaps because so little of the film takes place in the grimy New York of the director’s best films. Instead, most of it was shot in the Philippines which do of course stand in for Colombia as well as take on their more typical role as Vietnam for a low budget production.

However, even though the whole thing doesn’t hang together too well, at least Walken, Ironside, James, Alonso and the merry rest of the cast are usually fun to watch, the film’s freewheeling moments of craziness can be pretty great, and from time to time, Glickenhaus comes up with the sort of thing I have by now learned to love him for. Take the scene where our heroes are in dire need of money to buy guns from Ironside, and shoot through a bunch of drug dealers, only to be taught the class politics of the drug war by the lone survivor (Luis Guzmán!), after which they rather steal from a banker (while pretending to be Mossad agents, because why not, right?). That’s not the sort of thing you’ll encounter in many vigilante and mercenary movies, and it is this kind of curveball that makes slogging through the slow bits perfectly worthwhile.


Do I need mention that Glickenhaus’s politics are certainly rather more complicated than those of the filmmakers of your typical flag-waving US action movie?

Hero and the Terror (1988)

Three years ago, cop Danny O’Brien (Chuck Norris) got his ass kicked by frightening – and decidedly uncultured, you Hannibal fans will be disappointed to hear – serial killer Simon Moon (Jack O’Halloran). Moon more or less knocked himself out while pursuing the fleeing Danny. Danny, despite being honest about what happened, earned himself the un-ironic – and hated by him – nickname of “Hero” for it nonetheless, as well as a nice case of PTSD.

Danny certainly managed to live up to the hero moniker afterwards, though. Now, his pregnant girlfriend, his former therapist Kay (Brynn Thayer), is moving in with him, so things are definitely looking up for him. Curiously, though, his nightmares about Moon are returning. This will turn out to be prophetic when the killer manages to break out of psychiatric care and continues right where he began.

This, one among a handful of films in the Cannon canon that tries to have one of the studio’s action heroes work through a horror film plot, is certainly one of the more interesting outings of Chuck Norris. One of the film’s more remarkable aspects is that it is about what its title promises metaphorically as well as literally; it is a film about a Chuck Norris style male macho hero fighting his fears, in a genre where most protagonists aren’t even allowed to admit they have such a thing as emotions. And it doesn’t seem only to be the fear of getting one’s ass kicked by the mute animalistic serial killer Norris is fighting here – having Norris playing a character suffering under a form of post-traumatic stress after his first encounter with the big bad, is certainly a thing to behold  – but also a doubt of being a good enough person to be allowed to have the peaceful, traditional family life he clearly craves.

In a curious twist, it’s not Norris’s Danny O’Brien who is suffering from an actual fear of commitment here but rather his pregnant girlfriend Kay. Danny’s doubts are not about not wanting to commit, but rather about perhaps not deserving to commit. Now, there seems to be a simple macho logic at work here where Danny once lost his fight against his greatest enemy and is therefor not deserving of claiming his female prize until after reclaiming his manly accolades in a rematch, but this reading is complicated by several facts. Firstly, there’s the simple fact that Kay’s never played by the film as an object, and it is indeed one of its surprising pleasures that the many scenes between her and Danny are played for warmth and hint at the complicated feelings between two people who know and love one another well, suggesting the film knows that kicking serial killer ass or not does not a man make. The film, in another choice that pleasantly surprised me, also never uses the old cliché of Moon threatening Kay as part of the plot; there’s Danny fearing this, but it’s not actually happening, suggesting that this one enemy and event that defines Danny in his own eyes might not be quite as objectively central to his life as he assumes. Nor he to the life of his arch enemy, for that matter.

It is, however, certainly central to his self definition. It seems to have been Danny actually losing against and fleeing Moon, and getting dubbed “hero” nonetheless when his enemy simply goes down in an accident that’s pushed O’Brien to become an actual hero, the fear he now fights what pushed him into becoming a better person. One also shouldn’t forget that Kay was his therapist when his PTSD was at its worst (obviously one of somewhat dubious ethics), so meeting the woman he wants to marry is also a product of his losing this fight. I really can’t help looking at all of this and thinking that Hero and the Terror doesn’t buy into a part of the (often intensely entertaining, don’t get me wrong) macho bullshit that is part and parcel of its genre at all, and really rather suggests that being Chuck Norris, decent human being, is a much greater achievement than being Chuck Norris, ass-kicking machine.

Speaking of Norris, as a great detractor of the man’s acting abilities and particularly his line delivery, I am rather dumbfounded by his performance here. Dialogue flows from his mouth as if he were an actual human being that talks to other human beings on a regular basis. Even better, he actually gives a good show of himself on the important job of portraying Danny’s more fragile side. Following what Norris does here, I can actually imagine a parallel world where he became a decent actor specializing in the more complicated macho characters instead of the walking, talking cartoon he actually ended up as.

As a Cannon action movie, this is a rather slow one, as befits its more thoughtful approach to the action genre, apparently finding it at least just as important to spend time on Danny’s inner life and his relationship to Kay than on the all out shooting, shouting and explosions fest you’d expect coming in. That doesn’t mean William Tannen’s film is boring, mind you – for one, the quiet scenes are actually effective and involving, and secondly, the film does generally put in a bit of action or another slasher-style murder by Moon when things threaten to slow down too much. Generally, the action and horror scenes are staged efficiently and competently, with a couple of scenes concerning Moon and his hide-out even becoming atmospheric and tight.

Plus, there is always at least a bit of Cannon insanity coming through, my particular favourite in this regard being the death of Steve James’s character. It takes place in the empty Wiltern cinema, while James, nominally on guard duty, starts off his work out routine by jogging through the empty seats of the place to the heady beats of Mozart, until he is fatefully interrupted by Moon. It’s an absolutely absurd scene, obviously, yet it’s also imaginative and really rather beautiful.


The film makes fantastic use of its Los Angeles locations in more than just this one scene. The Wiltern clearly is the star of this aspect of the film – whoever had the idea to shoot there and enable the very mild echoes of Phantom of the Opera that come with its use here deserves much praise – but there’s quite a bit of personality to many of the film’s other locations too, providing the film with a sense of place not terribly typical of Cannon’s action output.

American Ninja (1985)

Mysterious private Joe T. Armstrong (Michael Dudikoff) has just barely arrived at an US Army base on the Philippines, and already gets into a whole load of trouble. First, he uses his mysterious (he’s a childhood amnesiac, of course) ninjitsu training to save Patricia (Judie Aronson), the daughter of the base’s commander, and perhaps the most insipid creature on Earth, from being kidnapped by the ninjas supporting a mysterious group of rebels, leading to everyone around, including said commanding officer, being very angry with him in a way every twelve year old will understand. Then more ninjas try to kill Joe T., a romance develops between Patricia and our hero, and after that, even more ninjas try to kill him, his co-soldier Corporal Jackson (Steve James) needs to be kicked by him until they become fast friends, and yet still more ninjas attempt the killing. Why, it’s as if nefarious things were going on in the Philippines.

I have to admit, I consciously left out the whole angle of what the bad guys in Sam Firstenberg’s American Ninja are all about here during the synopsis, and even that one of them is called The Black Star Ninja (Tadashi Yamashita), but the film itself seems so disinterested in giving its bad guys a plan that’s vaguely sensible even for action movie plans, I’m just finishing what the film starts. Sure, there’s also the thing where Joe finds out why he has ninja super powers, but that is dramatically so disconnected from the rest of the plot it’s not all that interesting to learn that John Fujioka taught him.

Of course – and fortunately, seeing as how little the film cares about these other things – this is one of the core texts of not only the not so short infatuation of Western filmmakers with ninjas – preferably Caucasian ones, unless they are called Sho Kosugi – but also of Golan, Globus and Cannon Films, and as such it just isn’t about giving a damn about its plot. If there’s some interest to find in the plot of a Cannon production, that’s more of a happy accident. What it is obviously all about is the action (yes, I’m a genius, why do you ask, dear reader?), and Firstenberg’s film delivers quite a lot of that here. Well, the fights are rather slow when you’ve seen comparable Asian films from decades earlier, a comparison that is rather inevitable when you encounter a film containing as many ninjas as this one does, the choreography is not particularly inspired, and while Michael Dudikoff isn’t as improbable a ninja as Franco Nero, nor is wearing a headband declaring him to be a ninja, he’s also not as convincing as one would like.

Dudikoff isn’t much of an actor here, either, mumbling his dialogue, emoting awkwardly, and more often than not making the impression he’s not at all happy being in front of the camera. Even though he never really became a great on-screen charismatic, it’s rather astonishing when you see him here and then compare with his efforts in 1986’s Dudikoff/James/Firstenberg film Avenging Force, where he has very quickly gotten a lot more present and willing. That film is actually superior to American Ninja in pretty much every aspect, now that I think about it – the action is tighter and more interesting, the acting better, Steve James shirtlesser, the villains more interesting and lively, and there’s even something of a plot.

But I digress, quite badly even, particularly since, having said all these mean and nasty things about basically every aspect of American Ninja, I also have to note that I still had a blast watching it, because all the awkwardness and the cheese on display don’t feel like signs of incompetence at all but rather as if this were a much scrappier production than it is, of pretty insane enthusiasm, which is quite a feat for a film so clearly cashing in on various fads. True or not, competent or not, the way the film throws ninjas and slightly wonky action sequences at its audience feels a lot like kids playing with the stuff they feel is awesome, and there’s an excitement here surrounding even the most stupid moments that makes the film very much worth watching. Even if a lot about American Ninja is wrong, it just feels so right to the twelve year old inside me (and that’s its target audience anyhow).

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On ExB: Avenging Force (1986)

Is this the magnum opus of Michael-Dudikoff-and-Steve-James-featuring Cannon action despite the absence of ninjas? It sure might be from where I’m looking.

There may be no American ninjas involved this time, but Avenging Force makes up for that sad lack by its sheer power of awesomeness. My column at the venerable Exploder Button does get rather excited, so please click on through, unless you have a very weak heart.

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