Four years after his first rampage, John Eastland (Robert Ginty) returns to arbitrarily murder random gang members.
When his new love interest is attacked by a gang led by X (Mario Van Peeples), Eastland/a stuntman in a mask turns his flamethrower on the gang of Mad Max-inspired bad 'uns.
While I do enjoy some of their output, I do not have a soft spot for Cannon Films. That being said, there is no denying that - unlike a lot of studios of the time and today - there is something distinctive about eerie output.
There is a cartoonish quality to Cannon movies that have given them a cult audience. And it is always fascinating to see how their films - no matter whoever writes or directs - always share the same simplistic view of the world. In a way, their reductive approach to action movies in particular feel like unintentional commentary about the American audience they sought to reach - the villains are always racial stereotypes; their victims straight out of Reagan campaign commercials. They are so on-the-nose they could almost pass for parody.
Like other studios, Cannon Films needed product that they could sell to investors. While this is necessary in the studio system, there is a something almost frenzied about Cannon's output, in terms of both variety and execution. It is almost like they wanted to grab every audience with every kind of movie you can think of (sometimes in the same movie; see the Flashdance-meets-The Exorcist mashup Ninja III - The Domination). To grab easy box office, they bought best-selling books, ripped off past hits and made innovative attempts at adapting different kinds of intellectual property such as toys (Masters of the Universe) and comic books (Captain America; the un-produced Spider-Man). They also made a lot of sequels to movies made by other companies.
One of these films was a follow-up to a sleeper hit from 1980, The Exterminator.
The original Exterminator is a curious mishmash of Vietnam vet drama and vigilante picture — the sequel is a cartoon of ultra violence. I tried to watch the original, and could not make it 15 minutes in. While it aims for a similar gritty style, Exterminator 2 is so hyperbolic in its execution that it feels more of a piece with Cannon's Death Wish sequels than the original.
It almost did not come to the screen.
This movie went through a major overhaul in post-production — writer-director Mark Buntzman was fired after he went way over-budget and ‘movie doctor’ William Sachs was brought on to re-shoot large portions of the movie. Unable to secure leading man Robert Ginty for the re-shoots, Sachs came up with the ingenious idea of turning the Exterminator into masked flame-throwing anti-hero. Freed from having to show his hero’s face, Sachs shot various scenes with Ginty’s stand-in torching various gang members and Mario Van Peeples as the villainous X, the gang leader after the Exterminator’s blood.
The plot is pretty simple — John Eastland (Ginty) spends his nights torching gang-bangers and his days accompanying his friend Be Gee on his route as a garbageman. When the woman he loves is attacked and injured by X’s gang, Eastland goes over the edge.
This transition is less obvious in the finished movie. The movie opens with a scene of a masked Eastland torching a group of sadistic robbers, implying that he has already resumed murdering people (or never stopped in the first place).
Once his girlfriend/plot device has been attacked, the movie is peppered with other scenes where Eastland torches other gang members — this means there is no real sense of escalation (or even justification) since Eastland never gave up being the Exterminator.
As far as the acting goes, the movie's stitched-together nature might have worked in its favour. In the lead role, Robert Ginty is a snooze. I do not like writing that, but the scenes with him and the masked stuntman playing him in the reshoots carry the same lack of personality. Frankie Faizon briefly appears as one of his friends, and the disjunct in acting styles has to be seen to be believed.
While Ginty is a black hole, Van Peeples is pretty fun as the villain - with his build and physicality, there were a few moments where he reminded me of Tom Hardy's Bane (there is one scene where he kills an underling that is very reminiscent of that masked villain). Due to Ginty's absence for the reshoots, he took more of the spotlight and gives the movie more of a centre. Plus, this is a b-level action movie: without Van Peeples, this movie would be much harder to watch.
By the look of the Ginty footage, the Buntzman version of Exterminator 2 would have been fairly underwhelming. Thanks to the intervention of the Cannon bigwigs, and Sachs’ reshoots, the final movie is the perfect example of the Cannon action flick: unpretentious, fast-paced and cartoonishly violent.
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