Coffy/Review
From The Grindhouse Cinema Database
< Coffy
Pam Grier is Coffy, a sexy nurse who decides to go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge to get back at the drug dealers who got her sister hooked on heroin. I know I know, the premise is very simple, BUT Pam Grier's fierce personality mixed with her natural sexiness drives this movie over the top! Coffy's first play is to go incognito as a trashy hooker to grab the attention of the local pushers. In a timely fashion, Coffy lures them with her voluptuous body and they take her back to their apartment. Once they are into the lovin' mood, Coffy whips out a sawed off shotgun and blows one of the dudes heads clean off, Exploitation Style! Then she takes care of the other one by shooting him up with a lethal dose of smack.
In between her job and vigilante spree, Coffy finds some time to spend with her wealthy boyfriend (Booker Bradshaw) an aspiring politician that seems to be the remedy to her seething need for payback. Coffy can see that he is a man that wants to make the community better by getting rid of the criminals and it impresses her. The two make love and sit in front of a warm fire showing us that their intimate relationship seems to be perfect.
Coffy continues to track down everyone involved with the drug pushers who did her sister wrong. In one great scene, she confronts a junkie girl who buys smack from the dealers and gets her to talk. That is, until the junkie's lesbian girlfriend comes home. The butch lesbian gets the idea that Coffy is having an affair with her lover, so she goes buckwild and they proceed to destroy the house in a fight, but Coffy manages to make it out of there in one piece.
Coffy's not satisfied with that. She wants to know who the big man is behind all the drug dealers around her hood. One of the main contacts is a pimp named King George (Robert Doqui). Check out the cartoony pimp suit he wears in this, he makes Dolemite look tame! Coffy goes undercover again as a prostitute to infiltrate King's organization and take out his entourage. At a big party held by King George, Coffy and one of the other prostitutes (played by Linda Haynes) who's jealous of her, have one of the best movie catfights of all time. Coffy puts razor blades in her fake afro before the fight, and when the white hooker goes to grab her head there's blood everywhere!
One of King George's top clients is a crime kingpin named Vitroni (Allan Arbus). Coffy is hired by Vitroni for a night of lovin and she gets ready with a little surprise. Vitroni cruelly tells her to "Crawl you black bitch!". Coffy then whips out a gun and tries to shoot him but she's stopped before she can do any damage. Vitroni assumes this is an assassination attempt by King George and the next day Vitroni's thugs take him for a little ride. They tie King to the back of the car and drag him around at top speed. This has to be the best "man dragged behind car" sequences ever put on film. It's simply outrageous and very sick but oddly funny!
Coffy continues her investigation but she is shocked when the trail leads her to the door of someone she trusts the most. The grand finale of this Baadasss classic has our heroine in super revenge mode which is where Pam Grier suddenly became the female empowerment icon of the 1970s.
This is Jack Hill's most famous film and he again manages to weave a great crime story together with cool characters and a certain amount of depth. Watch for an appearance by Hill regular Sid Haig (Spider Baby, Pit Stop) as one of Vitroni's thugs. COFFY is the definition of Classic Exploitation Cinema. It has everything you want from this kind of movie, especially the over the top-cartoonish violence that just gets your adrenaline going!
Peter Roberts is the co-founder/editor-in-chief of the Grindhouse Cinema Database (GCDb) and contributor to the GCDb's sister site Furious Cinema. A Massachusetts native, he is an avid film fan that has been immersed in the world of entertainment and pop culture his entire life. He is a professional digital media designer and educator.
