70s exploitation cinema is nothing to fuck around with. If you’re of a nervous disposition and prefer your heroes more clean cut and virtuous, then buddy, you’re clearly in the wrong place – however, as you push through the moral greys, wanton violence, casual racism and rampant misogyny, you’ll often find exagerated worlds that are more telling of the periods they were made than most “straight” flicks could ever hope to be.
Riding that crest of a wave as it crashed into drive-ins and run down, flea-pit grindhouse cinemas was the Blaxploitation craze that provided us with the likes of Shaft, Superfly and Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. However, just because the brothers were quite adept at sticking to the Man, there was no reason the sisters couldn’t step up and do it too; so with the sound of a cocked shotgun and a voluminous afro that surrounds her head like a halo of streetwise vengeance, we got to witness the ascension of the incomparable Pam Grier who was putting down street punks even before Michael Winner’s Death Wish hit the streets.
Flower Child Coffin (yes, that is her actual name – but you can call her Coffy) is an emergency room nurse who has just about hit her limit when it comes to the junkies, pumps and pushers that are choking the streets of Los Angeles, but she’s especially pissed at the dealers who managed to get her eleven year old sister hooked on heroin. We’re introduced to her as she sneaks under the dope dealer’s radar by posing as a prostitute who will do anything for a fix, and when the guy’s guard is down lower than his pants, she gets a measure of revenge when she whips out a shot gun and turns the pusher’s face into bloody tapioca and makes his underlings OD on his own junk.
From here, Coffy switches back from angel of vengence to angel of mercy and returns to her semi-regular life with her city councilman boyfriend, Howard Brunswick; but when her cop friend, Carter, is assaulted by a couple of masked thugs to the point where he sustains a hefty amount of brain damage, she vows to settle the score once again.
This time she targets local, flamboyant pimp, King George, with the aim to leapfrog past him to get to Mafia don Arturo Vitroni and she starts climbing the necessary rungs by posing as a call girl with possibly the most unconvincing Jamaican accent you’ve ever heard. Thankfully, none of Vitroni’s goons have an ear for accents because before you know it, she’s joined King George’s cadre of whores and is examining his operation from within. However, after a sizable twist that puts a sizable spotlight on Coffy’s intentions, the vengeance-fueled woman finds that her struggle has somehow gotten even more dangerous – but even surrounded by leering rapists, violent whores and professional killers, Coffy proves that hell hath no fury for a shotgun waving sister with an afo.
As blaxploitation movies go, Coffy nails an aesthetic so broad, that at times you may be mistaken that you’re actually watching a spoof in the vein of Black Dynamite as the movie rapidly doused you in outlandish fashions and a classic, near constant “bah-chika-wah” beat on the score. However, once you get past pimps clad in mustard yellow jumpsuits so garish, they’re one stop short of being a Joel Schumacher Batman villain, it becomes very clear that Coffy likes to play upsettingly rough. Displaying a gritty edge so grim and vicious it makes your average Death Wish sequel feel like a balanced account of the times, Jack Hill’s ode to sleaze rarely pulls any punches as he strives to make this squalid little epic as brutal as he can – certainly far nastier than Gordon Parks’ groundbreaking Shaft. For a start, life in Coffy’s world is upsettingly cheap, and to have any respect for the law at all means you’re long overdue for a dirt nap, or at the very least, up for brain damaging pounding courtesy of some lead pipes. A certain amount of urban decay and racial tension is certainly the standard for blaxploitation movies, but the fact that the lead in this entry is a woman – and an extremely fetching one at that – means that the tone runs extra sordid.
For example, Coffy, get into numerous scrapes with both men and women and in virtually all of them, the movie unrepentantly revels in its exploitation nature by having her breasts suddenly torn free of her clothes at the slightest drop of a hat. In fact, an insanely raucous scene that sees Coffy go toe to toe with all of King George’s ‘hos in a fist fight sees every single woman have their boobs violently exposed at some point in possibly one of the most gratuitous movie scenes I’ve ever witnessed.
However, if one woman could emerge from such sexist trapping with her dignity entact, it’s Pamela fucking Grier, and emerge she does to not only give this grotty little epic a real sense of legitimacy, she also somehow gives her character a rock-solid nobility that impossibly remains untarnished no matter what creepy scenario Hill hurls at her next. In Grier’s hands, Coffy is an impossibly dedicated vigilante who has no hesitation using her body to get her to her goal who simultaneously absorbs punishment while taking no shit. The very second she has manipulated her quarry into the most vunerable position, she’ll switch from her desperate crack-ho persona into the baddest, shotgun wielding mama you’ve ever fucking seen and watching her outsmart smugly cruel men of power is a legitimate trip.
However, while Grier cements an iconic status that would inspire the likes of Quentin Tarantino decades later, Hill makes sure that the rest of the film fizzles with grotesque invention thanks to the details he brings to some truly bruising set pieces.
For a start, Coffy has prep skills that would floor Batman and when she’s not breaking into King George’s stash to swap it for sugar to avoid a possible future “accidental” overdose, she’s threading razor blades into her hair to counteract anyone yanking on her follicles during a brawl. On top of that Hill stages a truly ghoulish death when a set-up George is giving a hideous version of a lynching when he’s dragged behind a car by a noose round his neck.
The movie comes fully stacked with an appropriately unsavory looking supporting cast with the likes of Sid Haig and Robert DoQui flanking Grier as they line up to receive her righteous vengeance and it all adds to that skeevy nature of the film that you just cant replicate in this day and age.
If your tolerance of casual and vicious 70s-style violence/racism/misogyny/drug use tends to lean towards squeamish, then Coffy probably a bad choice for family movie night; however, when it comes to delivering the type of stylish brutality that comes with exploitation territory, Coffy will be your cup of tea.
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