Customer Reviews

Exterminator 2 [VHS]

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(3)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

This is your classic D grade trash movie, and a guilty pleasure. This time Ginty's back & after a scummy street gang with the aid of his garbage truck arsenal. Definately better than the first movie, and actually quite fun.

This sequel to "The Exterminator" returns Johnny Eastland (Robert Ginty) to the mean streets of NYC, this time sporting a flame thrower and a welding mask . Eastland and a friend (Frankie Faison, better known to modern audiences as Barney from "The Silence of the Lambs") run afoul of a sinister gang led by a psychotic named "X" ( a surprisingly entertaining Mario Van Peebles), and soon enough Eastland is once again in action on a mission of revenge.
Although this is definitely a knock off of "Death Wish" (it is low budget to say the least), "Exterminator 2" is a lot better than it's reputation would indicate. This isn't the type of movie that any filmgoer would view expecting oscar worthy performances or direction, but rather a shamelessly exploitative action flick that pumps up the "eye for an eye" philosophy to the max. That's okay, though, because it's supposed to be such a film.
By streamlining Eastland's M.O. in this picture, the filmmakers have given him a little more of an edge. Whereas the first film had the vigilante moments incorporating a wide variety of 'creative deaths" (almost as if it were the slasher movie variant of "Death Wish"), here Ginty pretty much stays with the flamethrower as his primary tool of vengeance. One can conceivably understand why any punk terrorizing the streets would be in fear for his life if a vigilante were walking around torching their numbers at random. This allows for some pretty good moments where The Exterminator, almost phantom-like in his ability to emerge from the shadows, walks up out of the night to torch some criminal (One of the more memorable scenes involves a thug keeping guard while perched in a tree).
There are logic errors throughout the film ( examples: in the climactic confrontation, how does "X" know Eastlands name? And since when does a police helicopter crash in the middle of a city street with nary a cop car in sight?) but these can be forgiven due to the movies willingness to satisy the viewers action lust and show us what we came to see in the first place- The Exterminator laying down his own violent brand of justice.
Over all, I gave this four stars because the film knows what it is, and aspires to be nothing more (or less) than fun, B-movie trash. Besides, it's light years and away better than "Death Wish" numbers 2-5.

Will you people calm down.
No this movie is not "Citizen Kane" and sure its a ripoff of the "Death Wish" movies, but so what.
You've got a couple of likeable characters, some big time bad guys lead by a young Mario Van Peebles, and you've got flamethrowers and garbage trucks used as weaspons...what more do you want????
Any Golan-Globus movie with butt-kicking and explosions is fine by me.

I loved it when I was about 7, I found it used and bought it. It wasn't as good as it used to be . but I still liked it.

While I am no fan of the first "Exterminator," "Exterminator 2" makes the original look like a contender for the A.F.I.'s top 100 list. We are led to believe that this is a vigilante film, but there is little in the way of the vengeance one would expect from that genre. In fact, director Mark Buntzman and his co-writer/co-producer William Sachs appear to be secretly rooting for the villains -- in this case, a psychopathic street gang led by the shoulder-pads-adorned "X" (Mario Van Peebles) -- and seem more intent on imposing emotional and psychological distress on the audience than they are in creating a movie that is faithful to the vigilante mold.

The gang commits acts of intense violence against innocent people which, among other things, include: the brutal and cold-blooded shooting death of an elderly couple; the kidnapping of a woman who is then forcibly injected with heroin; and, in what is probably the film's most indulgent and manipulative scene, an inappropriately long sequence depicting the abduction of a security guard, who is tied spread-eagle to an X-shaped cross, taken screaming into the bowels of a Hades-like subway station and placed onto a set of train tracks where he is electrocuted and then crushed under an oncoming locomotive, as X and the other punks gleefully look on.

Meanwhile, John Eastland (Robert Ginty), the titular "hero" of this sordid piece, seems like little more than an impotent secondary character who mopes listlessly from scene to scene and does not even carry out any form of justice on the evil-doers until they have already enacted the aforementioned carnage. Then when he finally dispatches some of the gang, the other members come back at him with twice the force, ultimately leading to the deaths of Eastland's best friend and his lover, and negating whatever means he takes to stop the hoodlums once and for all. (Whether it be the fault of the film or Ginty's performance or both, Eastland is so bland that the character apparently fails even to make the cover art of the most recent VHS box, leaving us to instead view a photograph of the self-conscious, ever-posturing Van Peebles in his foolish X garb.)

As the film nears its end, X is reprieved with a relatively painless and very anti-climactic death. Utterly devoid of catharsis, his demise is given none of the protracted attention the filmmakers pay to the tortures that X and his cohorts inflict upon their undeserving victims.

If you are looking for plain shock cinema in the vein of "Natural Born Killers" or the movies made by Troma Entertainment then "Exterminator 2" may be to your liking. However, if you wish to see a true vigilante film, you would be wiser to watch Charles Bronson in the "Death Wish" series, or Jack Hill's "Coffy," or William Lustig's aptly titled "Vigilante." All much better choices than this mean-spirited, bait-and-switch trash.

This is less a sequel to the original than a remake of it .Robert Ginty -giving another solid performance -is once again out to clean up the streets of 1980's New York and this time around he arms himself with a flame thrower and operates out of an armoured garbage truck .
His special attention is devoted to "X " a street gang leader with delusions of grandeur -he sees himself as an almost Messianic figure ,out to unite the street gangs so as to make them more organised and powerful

This role is played with some style and a certain tongue in cheek quality by Mario Van Peebles nut , despite this and other decent performances the picture does not make the impact of its predecessor.
The budget allows for more and noisier explosions and shootouts this time around but there is little freshness or originality ,and you get a somehat more pyrotechnically advanced version of the superior original
Recommended to vigilante movie completists only

Personally I have never seen the first Exterminator film but after seeing the second one it is not on my priority list. I've seen a lot of Golan-Globus films such as Death Wish 3 and 4 ( because my older brother Eric owns them all)but this is one of the worst. Some of the punks in this movie seem like the ones in other Golan-Globus films. I like Van Peebles as X and the ending rocks otherwise this is a movie just to rent.

Extermiator 2 is a weak sequel to a weak original. Only this time having the financial baking of B-action producers Golan-Globus, adding to its trashiness. If I am in the mood for a Golan-Globus film, their great to waste some time. But this is not one of their best. It still suprises me that an Exterminator III was never made. Check out Golan-Globus's outher B-Action films Death Wish 3, American Ninja, Invasion U.S.A., and Missing In Action. There much better!

Say what you will about James Glickenhaus' original, at least he appeared to be TRYING to make a decent film. This sequel is so ineptly made that it cannot even qualify as a guilty pleasure. One interesting aspect is that most of the "Exterminator's" action scenes are performed with a mask on--I wonder if Robert Ginty was even in these scenes? As for the scenes he did appear in...