Pop quiz everyone – who immortalised the line ‘I’ll be back’ in a film?
If you said Arnold Schwarzenegger, you would be partly right, probably because the line has now passed into folklore as a memorable line quoted straight from the original 1984 US release.
However, the line also forms the promo line for an exploitation thriller that was released three years before, when John Eastland (the late Robert Ginty) said this to some of the characters he came into contact with:
“If you’re lying, I’ll be back”
Written and directed by James Glickenhaus (who directed the 1983 thriller CODENAME: THE SOLDIER aka THE SOLDIER (US)), THE EXTERMINATOR is a post-Vietnam thriller set in New York in which two veterans of the war, Eastland and Michael Jefferson (Steve James) work in a processing plant for beer and meat and live in the Bronx. When some thugs attempt to nick some beer from a storage area, Michael saves John from being beaten up and they get into a fight.
However, when Michael is paralysed in a revenge attack by a gang known as ‘The Ghetto Ghouls’, Eastland vows revenge on those who had done it to them. Soon after, his exploits become more broader, taking out his revenge on a Mob head and going deep into the underbelly of the sleaze of 42nd Street, where he discovers a variety of equally darker characters.
Detective James Dalton (Christopher George) is on the case and tries to piece together the acts that Eastland is carrying out….
42nd Street and Times Square has changed so drastically from what we see in THE EXTERMINATOR, with most if not all of the cinemas closed down making it more of a family-friendly experience. The film is clearly of its’ time and remains a very powerful and violent movie that lives in the shadow of films like DEATH WISH.
The pre-credit sequence in Vietnam features a very effective moment of gore, but would not be the sort of movie that even the independent sector would make today, making it such a unique addition to cinema history.