Reviewed by

Christopher Armstead

We have this movie here ‘ExTerminators’ which we must say is not all that good but it’s not Heather Graham’s fault. Poor Heather. Always getting flak from haters claiming that she can’t act. Haters. Watch ‘Adrift in Manhattan’ and then tell me that Heather Graham can’t act and even if she couldn’t act… which she can… but even if she couldn’t I’m thinking that the woman brings more enough to the table that this perceived lack of acting ability, which is a falsehood, should be overlooked anyway. That’s what we think. That and this movie ‘ExTerminators’ isn’t very good.

Alex, as played by the bountiful Heather Graham, is having a bad day. In the morning she was downsized and in the evening her man was caught on the couch doing a cutie pie that wasn’t her. Drowning her sorrows in shopping, Alex encounters an asshole male, which will be an overriding theme in this film, and she punches him in the face which lands her in anger management classes. Here she meets all kinds of angry bitches but in particular Stella as played by Jennifer Coolidge doing what Jennifer Coolidge does as an actress, and she also meets crazy Nikki played by Amber Heard who is doing what we are not used to seeing Amber Heard doing as an actress which is usually being blonde and pretty. Here she’s a brunette and pretty.

These women are good for the repressed Alex as they bring her out of her repressive shell, which leads to all kinds of self improvements for the woman as she trades her eyeglasses for contacts, becomes more assertive vocally and dresses more like a prostitute. Outstanding. This was after they ‘accidentally’ ran the abusive husband of one of their anger management classmates off the road sending him to a fiery death. Alex feels bad about this. Nikki and Stella do not. Nikki and Stella have even started a small lucrative cottage business in murdering the asshole husbands, boyfriends and Significant Others of their classmates of Angry Bitches.

There are complications. There’s a weird IRS agent who is stalking Alex which leads to him discovering about Stella and Nikki’s side hustle, Alex is dating the one halfway decent male in this movie in officer Dan (Matthew Settle) who by chance is investigating this odd string of murders, and eventually Alex herself discovers the evil ways of her buddies which will lead to Alex having to make a difficult decision between choosing the path of right or the path of wrong. I was hoping for the path of funny, but I would not get this.

So what we have here with ‘ExTerminators’ is a Dark Comedy. The problem with this Dark Comedy, at least as it played out to me, is that it wasn’t very funny and it wasn’t near dark enough. So instead of a Dark Comedy we have more of a Mauve Bemusement. You see the movie isn’t awful… it’s just… kind of there. I do this thing for comedies when they go a while without making me laugh, and that thing I do is look at my DVD counter to see how much time has passed. If a movie is truly funny looking at the DVD counter isn’t even a thought but in some of these so-called comedies the eye wanders downward… imagine actually having a conversation with Heather Graham which is an example of what the eyes might tend to do when watching a comedy that isn’t making you laugh. This one made it to the 16:38 mark before Jennifer Coolidge was able to squeeze that first chuckle out of us over here. But even though ‘ExTerminators’ was failing miserably as a comedy it was still mildly intriguing with what was going on in the movie because the subject matter was mildly intriguing.

Okay, so we begrudgingly accept the fact this movie isn’t very funny and it isn’t going to get much funnier as it plays on but we still have the darkness of these misanthropic bitches to fall back on, but yet the movie didn’t completely commit to this either. I don’t know much but I’m thinking if you’re going to go Dark then having your main character being presented as Sunshine Personified might not have been the best move. Heather Graham can do Dark… I’ve seen it… so make use of this talent. So since our main character was happy, joyful and blissfully ignorant for 98.7% of this dark comedy, The Darkness task fell on Amber Heard’s shoulders. Really cute kid. But we gotta say in this movie she seemed to be standing on a platform yelling ‘Look at me, I’m acting Dark over here!’ We know what we get with Jennifer Coolidge but even she was toned down quite a bit and all we really got was J.Cool Light.

I just want to reiterate that despite the fact this movie did seem to fall far short of everything it was trying to accomplish as a work of cinematic art, it was still crafted well enough to avoid being terrible. It was benign and forgettable, which I realize isn’t a compliment, but it really wasn’t terrible. For whatever that’s worth.