The people Ginty kills may be worthless scum but he derives too much pleasure in murder, perhaps a sign of his post-Vietnam psychosis. Even George is more interested in other things than the murder of these lowlifes, though eventually admires Ginty’s self-righteousness. In that, it recalls the ethical dialectic achieved by Michael Winner in the seminal Death Wish. But Ginty is a more ambiguous figure than was Charles Bronson in that film, his cute puppy-dog droopiness and blue eyes at odds with his amoral delight in retributive violence. Indeed, though Death Wish is the obvious inspiration for The Exterminator, Glickenhaus refers also to Taxi Driver in tying the vigilante to the psychotic Vietnam veteran – a character type that emerged before American film could directly confront the war itself. Thus, on one level the film considers the amoral violence of Vietnam a conditioning experience for Ginty, who when presented with a comparable dilemma to that depicted in the opening, merely resorts to his learned behaviour. At home, he is a nobody, who finds purpose, honour and even a perverse nobility in his murderous sadism. What emerges most ironically through this though is a depiction of the Vietnam veteran vigilante as a kind of modern noble savage, like Taxi Driver subverting films more concerned with moving towards social understanding. Glickenhaus denies such reconciliation, instead depicting a morally hypocritical and decaying modern America.
The urban wasteland in The Exterminator appropriately approaches the neo-noir despair of Martin Scorsese and Paul Schrader in the acknowledged 1970s classic Taxi Driver. In that film, paedophilia was evidence of endemic moral decay. However, paedophilia in The Exterminator is more disturbingly explicit and morally ambiguous, meant as both outrage and titillation, tailoring to an inherently jaded audience in its combination of torture and nudity. Oddly, the controversy surrounding this film centred less on its child sexual torture than on one scene wherein Ginty suspends a Mafia boss above an industrial meat grinder. Glickenhaus revels in the subsequent consequences, his absolute misanthropy conveyed in sick, gratuitous violence. Moral ambiguity is a standard amongst exploitation films, though rarely more disturbing than the wallow in moral disgust found here. It is a world of predators, where the only sense of justice is in the acts of a man as aberrant as those he despises. The film delights in this despair, becoming a powerful, if sleazy, vision of the desolation of the human spirit. In that, it epitomized the bleak tone of a mini revival of film noir oppressiveness in the New York cycle of exploitation cinema. It is unfair to dismiss the film as outright as it has been by popular critics. Despite its allusions to perhaps better films, The Exterminator retains its hopelessness and its power to disturb: it is ultimately a sad film, evidence of a lost faith in human nature. read more