The nifty indie outfit Synapse Films has released the grindhouse classic THE EXTERMINATOR (1980) in an extended (gorier) director’s cut as a Blu-ray/DVD combo pack. Though the care and professionalism that the Michigan-based outfit has brought to bear since it was founded in 1996 have always been conspicuous in their obscure and cult film acquisitions, Synapse releases have really enjoyed an uptake in quality over the past year or so, making them indistinguishable — and often plainly superior — to big studio releases.

Truth be told, THE EXTERMINATOR was never a favorite of mine. When I saw it thirty some years ago, it depressed me — less by virtue of its exploitative subject matter than for its cast of established actors working off the grid. I knew star Robert Ginty from his weekly TV series BAA BAA BLACK SHEEP, costar Christopher George from THE RAT PATROL and THE IMMORTAL and EL DORADO (1967) with John Wayne, and British leading lady Samantha Eggar from DOCTOR DOLITTLE (1967), THE MOLLY MCGUIRES (1970) and THE SEVEN PERCENT SOLUTION (1976). Mind you, I had just seen Eggar birthing a legion of hammer-wielding mutant children in David Cronenberg’s THE BROOD (1979) but she still carried an air of class and sophistication, which made her participation in this film seem, to me, incongruous and sad.

THE EXTERMINATOR is often fobbed off as a DEATH WISH (1974) clone but its pedigree is closer kin to ON THE WATERFRONT (1954) and TAXI DRIVER (1976). Writer-director James Glickenhaus had wanted Joseph Bottoms as his star but when Bottoms’ agent held out for more money, Glickenhaus went with the relatively untested Ginty, who had played the supporting role of a Vietnam veteran in Hal Ashby’s COMING HOME (1978). With his pouty lips, chum-chum cheeks and Lauren Tewes hairstyle, Ginty is a hard sell as a former infantryman and Bronx Terminal worker turned vigilante killer… and in some way that was the point. John Eastland is never depicted as a readymade man of action. We first see him blown ass over teakettle in Vietnam, rescued by his pal Washington (Steve James) just before the pair are taken prisoner by the Viet Cong. Washington has to play the hero again to save the pair from imminent death and even in peacetime it’s Washington who carries the day when Eastland interrupts a heist by a Bronx street gang and is beaten to the floor. It is only when the gang retaliates, attacking Washington as he traverses the blighted South Bronx, and rendering him quadriplegic, that the bland and directionless Eastland is prompted to cowboy up… extracting considerably more than a pound of flesh from the Ghetto Ghouls and then going after the mobsters shaking down the meatpacking district.

The raison d’être of THE EXTERMINATOR was and remains its arsenal of torture and coercion setpieces, in which Eastland subjects the parade of evil-doers to the heat of a blow torch, the gnashers of hungry ghetto rats, the odd slug from a .44 Magnum and the whirling teeth of a commercial meat grinder.

Not a graphic film (one impressive beheading gag aside) by today’s standards, THE EXTERMINATOR impressed its fanbase by sheer moxie and outrageousness, staging a succession of amped up “they’d never get away with that now” scenes with the permission and blessing of the New York Film Commission, the NYPD, and the office of then-mayor Ed Koch (who later presented Glickhaus with a Crystal Apple Award). Visible in the frame are the World Trade Center, the Bronx Terminal Market (both long gone), the old Times Square (chockablock with disreputable camera shops, movie theaters and peep shows) and the Old Homestead Steak House (still there!), all snapshots of another time and a place that, in many ways, no longer exists. The film preserves Manhattan at an all time morale low. The city’s decline as a cultural hub had been in evidence in Hollywood films at least as far back as THE OUT OF TOWNERS (1971) and ACROSS 110TH STREET (1972) and the dim prognosis was still in evidence in TIMES SQUARE (1980) and CRUISING (1980). Glickenhaus was directly inspired by the lurid headlines of The New York Post chronicling the sad fates of average Joes and Janes chewed up and spat out by urban blight and top tier corruption. Seen briefly in one station house scene is a flyer announcing the disappearance of Etan Patz, who was abducted from a SoHo street corner in May 1979 and became the first missing child to have his picture printed on a milk carton. The Patz case was given a fictional shellacking (and a happy ending that never happened) in the 1983 film WITHOUT A TRACE.

THE EXTERMINATOR takes a rather dim view of The Deuce, whose denizens are likened to maggots crawling on the carcass of some unfortunate carrion. (At one point, star Ginty strolls past a cinema showing CAULDRON OF DEATH, the US cut of the 1972 Italian-Spanish RICO, aka THE MEAN MACHINE, which starred Christopher Mitchum as a babyfaced avenger and boasted a scene in which a mobster is dissolved in a vat of acid.) Nevertheless, the film is pitched, in its extremes, straight to the glove of the Times Square grindhouses, whose habitues were encouraged to fist-pump their right-ons even as they were being judged as freaks and perverts. Informing the whole of THE EXTERMINATOR is an authorial longing for simpler and more innocent times, with both Ginty’s renegade and Christopher George’s dogged detective pining for the relative clarity of their tours in-country. Despite its rather unpalatable subject matter, THE EXTERMINATOR could play as Tea Party rallying cry, tendering as it does equal measures of anger and nostalgia. (Even the film’s villains long for the good old days.) Bunkered in his South Bronx tenement, surviving on a sustenance diet of Sartre, The Anarchist Cookbook and The Post and banging out manifesto-like letters-to-the-editor on his manual typewriter, John Eastland borders on a Unabomber-like sense of entitlement, with the script’s anti-CIA stance seeming less counter-culture thirty years after the fact than evocative of grass roots domestic terrorism.

By virtue of its special effects, THE EXTERMINATOR benefited from pre-release coverage in Fangoria magazine, which drew the curiosity of horror hounds like myself and added to the film’s cult cachet. Additional value now, a full generation later, is seeing New York theatre actors Louis Edmonds, Dennis Boutsikaris and Ned Eisenberg rubbing shoulders with Channel 7 news anchor Roger Grimsby, jazz saxophonist Stan Getz and former Bill Haley and the Comets drummer Dick Richards, billed under his birth name of Boccelli. Budgeted at $2 million, THE EXTERMINATOR made something like $40-50 million, resulting in a 1984 sequel and no small amount of copycats. Even the later FRIDAY THE 13TH sequels feel suspect, with disfigured bogeyman Jason Voorhees adopting a trademark hockey mask in the second sequel as John Eastland makes use of a face-concealing motorcycle helmet two-thirds of the way through THE EXTERMINATOR.

I like THE EXTERMINATOR considerably more now and enjoyed revisiting it via the Synapse DVD. It’s a somewhat sobering experience for a geezer like myself, knowing as I do that Christopher George would die of a massive heart attack in 1983…

… that Steve James succumbed to pancreatic cancer in 1993…

… and that the ever-youthful Robert Ginty passed away, also from cancer, in 2009, at the age of 60. That combined with the film’s end credits tableau, which balances the Statue of Liberty at the left of frame with the Twin Towers on the right, makes for a surprisingly bittersweet experience. What seemed like sleaze back in 1980 now plays a bit like a home movie, making me by turns misty-eyed, exhilarated and yearning for what was in many ways a simpler (if hardly more innocent or better) time. In addition to offering the feature on separate Blu-ray and hi-def DVD discs, Synapse has thrown in an informative audio commentary by James Glickenhaus, moderated to Temple of Schlock proprietor and 40-Deuce aficionado Chris Poggiali, and a theatrical trailer with TV spots. The disc streets on September 13th but can be pre-ordered from Amazon.

Exterminator (The)
DVD/Blu-ray Combo
Label: Synapse Films
Run Time: 104 Minutes In English Color
Widescreen Anamorphic 1.78:1 Region 0 DTS-HD MA 2.0 Mono
Production year: 1980
Director: James Glickenhaus
Stars: Robert Ginty, Christopher George,
Samantha Eggar, Steve James