The Exterminator

John Eastland is a Vietnam veteran trying to settle into ordinary life in New York, where street gangs, drugs and prostitution have taken over whole neighbourhoods. When his closest friend and former comrade in arms, Michael Jefferson, is brutally attacked by a gang and left crippled, Eastland decides the police cannot or will not act. Drawing on his combat training, he begins hunting down the criminals responsible, then keeps going, clearing the city's underworld one target at a time. His campaign earns him the name "The Exterminator," along with the attention of Detective James Dalton and a growing public reputation that makes him both feared and hunted.

The film is a 1980 American action crime drama directed and written by James Glickenhaus, the first of the features he directed, followed by The Protector, Shakedown and McBain. It was produced by Mark Buntzman and stars Robert Ginty as Eastland, Christopher George as Dalton, Samantha Eggar as Dr. Megan Stewart and Steve James as Jefferson, with a credited cast of twenty-four and a reported budget of two million dollars.

Ratings are modest: on IMDb it holds 5.7/10 from around 7,300 votes and on TMDB 5.5/10 from about 155 votes. A critics' rating of 4.1/10 from twelve reviews places it below those audience scores.