The Exterminator was the great tabloid cause celèbre of 1981 - there's even a delicious anecdote about how it was the one film that the great Russian director Andrei Tarkovsky (whose slow, spiritually intense creations are about as far removed from James Glickenhaus' slambang gorefest as could possibly be imagined) wanted to see during a brief visit to London, though his reaction to it is sadly unrecorded apart from a somewhat negative aside made during a lecture that evening about the importance of art in the cinema.

Personally, I wouldn't be quite so dismissive - plenty of great (or at least surprisingly intelligent) art has emerged from what its executive producers intended to be exploitative trash, including many of the titles mentioned above. But that said, I couldn't get too excited about The Exterminator - it's a slick, efficient, consistently watchable, moderately exciting but ultimately pretty soulless and faintly reprehensible film about a Vietnam veteran (ho hum) returning to New York and becoming a vigilante assassin.

The Vietnam footage that opens the film is actually rather impressive, especially considering the obviously rock-bottom budget - Glickenhaus and his cinematographer have obviously been paying careful attention to what Francis Coppola and Vittorio Storaro achieved in Apocalypse Now. Sadly, things go downhill somewhat when acting and dialogue take the place of atmospheric jungle stalkings - and some rather variable special effects: a beheading two-and-a-half minutes in is very effective, but a throat-slitting shortly afterwards is ludicrous - the actor all too obviously has a latex appliance strapped to his chin that doesn't even try to blend with his skin!

Anyway, John Eastman (Robert Ginty) has his life saved by his best friend Michael Jefferson (Steve James) in 'Nam, and when Jefferson is viciously mugged after they return to New York, Eastman tracks down, tortures and kills the attackers, and then turns full-blown vigilante, taking on anyone who even so much as crosses Jefferson's path. So the boss of the meat packing plant who laid him off after the mugging gets fed to his own meat grinder (an over-earnest film theorist might detect a hint of Marxist anti-capitalist rhetoric here, but I suspect this may be unintentional), which in turn leads on to a New Jersey senator with a penchant for trussing up and raping young boys (though I use the word "young" advisedly, since the only one of his victims we see must be at least 25), and various other scumbags who all of course Deserve To Die (and do, in considerable detail).

But the Exterminator, as the press comes to call him, is being stalked in turn, because inevitably a cop is on his tail, played by Christopher George of City of the Living Dead fame, though he doesn't actually do that much apart from go on romantic dates with Samantha Eggar's nurse, during which he tells her all sorts of presumably classified information in order to bring the audience up to speed (despite her second billing in the credits, she seems to have no other dramatic function).

I can't really blame the film-makers for one of the film's major problems, which is that the supposedly ultra-cool Exterminator has a more than passing resemblance to Keith Chegwin, which would be unfortunate enough at the best of times, but is particularly so at the time of writing given that Cheggers has been causing a spot of tabloid outrage of his own, courtesy of Channel Five and a certain naked gameshow.

But there's rather less excuse for the other problem, which is that the film is relentlessly po-faced (any humour is strictly unintentional), and since it's also a lot slicker than, say, a Herschell Gordon Lewis gore opus, the result is problematic on all sorts of levels. You don't have to be a radical feminist to find the leering pan down the body of a topless prostitute before she's tortured with a vaseline-coated soldering iron profoundly disturbing - and that's not "disturbing" in the sense of pleasurable chills, it's disturbing in the sense of wondering about the film-makers' motives for including that shot.

Of course, the torturers in turn get tortured and killed equally graphically later on - but there's an overwhelming impression of simultaneous possession and ingestion of cake here, with none of the moral disgust of, say, Wes Craven's rather more unnerving, fiercely intelligent Last House on the Left. That was a genuine horror film, whereas The Exterminator is more of a cheap thrill-ride - certainly diverting at the time, but leaving a decidedly upset stomach afterwards.

Considering it's non-anamorphic, the DVD's picture quality is unexpectedly good - and it's also framed at the correct 1.85:1 aspect ratio, which isn't always the case with low-budget films on low-budget labels. The image is a little softer than an anamorphic picture would have been, and the print isn't exactly in pristine condition (there are quite a few spots and scratches, and some horizontal streaking at around the 75-minute mark), but all in all it's considerably better than I was expecting, with a surprising amount of detail even in the darker night-set scenes.

Sadly, something seems to have gone wrong with the sound - according to the trailer, the original film was in Dolby Stereo, but for some reason the dialogue is badly out of balance with the music and sound effects. Whether this is a none too subtle attempt to get us to turn up the overall volume or just incompetence on the part of the sound engineers I don't know, but either way it's not very satisfactory: even after a fair amount of balance adjustment I still couldn't hear a word of the dialogue in the disco massacre scene, even with the music ('Disco Inferno', natch) playing at full volume, and many other scenes were equally problematic. Balance problems aside, it's a perfectly competent if unspectacular transfer that would normally gain a two or possibly even three-star rating. There are twelve chapter stops, which I'd say is an absolute minimum for a 97-minute feature.

Given that The Exterminator caused such a furore because of its violence, how much of it has been left in this version? We're going to have to do a bit of detective work here, because certain things initially don't add up. According to the BBFC, the film was submitted four times - the theatrical version in 1980 (101 mins 14 secs with unspecified cuts), and then three times on video, first in 1985 (94m21s with 2m54s of cuts), then in 1991 (94m0s with 3m38s of cuts), and finally in 2000 (94m0s with no cuts). Now it might seem obvious from that list that the latest version must have been pre-cut by the distributor beforehand… but the plot thickens, because contrary to what the BBFC claims the DVD under review is in fact 97 minutes 41 seconds long, which if adjusted to take account of the PAL speedup gives a theatrical running time of around just under 102 minutes.

So is this the uncut version? Given that there are plenty of gratuitously gory closeups of the kind that the BBFC are normally only too happy to remove, my initial reaction was to assume that it was - but unfortunately this is billed as being the "director's cut" boasting previously unseen footage, and a quick check on both the Internet Movie Database and Anchor Bay's website reveals that the full running time should in fact be 104 minutes. So I strongly suspect we're talking about the same 2-3 minutes of cuts mentioned above, in which case I'm going to have to recommend the Anchor Bay disc instead (no extras, but it's not regionally encoded, so it should play back on most systems provided they're NTSC compatible).

There's not much in the way of extras - just the trailer for The Exterminator plus six more from Synergy's DVD collection (the 'Synergy Showcase'!), but since that includes four-fifths of the complete work of my favourite New York sleaze maestro Frank Henenlotter, there's rather more schlocky entertainment on offer here than there is in the main feature!

The trailers for Basket Case and Basket Case 2 are just "what's in the basket?" teasers, but the one for Basket Case 3 is magnificently depraved - and reminded me of what a surprisingly sweet film it was despite the non-stop eviscerations and baby freak rampages. And there's also the painfully funny Frankenhooker, a trailer oddly absent from the Simitar DVD that I've reviewed elsewhere. The other two trailers are Maniac Cop and the Dolph Lundgren vehicle Red Scorpion, which look much less enticing, though the presence of It's Alive and Q - The Winged Serpent creator Larry Cohen and the great Bruce Campbell in the credits of the former might make it worth a look.

But whether or not The Exterminator was worth a look is a moot point - I'm glad I've seen it, if only for its notoriety, but it really doesn't have much going for it otherwise, and I have to admit that my initial reaction was "was that it?". Whether or not the Anchor Bay cut offers much more, I don't know - but on this evidence I rather doubt it.

Michael Brooke