Coffy (Jack Hill, 1973)

Writer/director Jack Hill has a small but vibrant filmography of cult classics, mostly made in the '70s for Roger Corman's American International Pictures. Hill, who is still alive but hasn't directed a feature film since the early '80s (a movie starring Sheryl Lee almost happened in the '90s), warms my heart by being one of the few b-movie/drive-in directors to happily and unashamedly express pride in his body of work without any qualifiers or self-deprecation. He's often said that he loved making these movies, that they stand the test of time, and that he had the freedom to do whatever he wanted as long as he put Corman's required sex and violence in the mix. He didn't have a bunch of suits signing off on his every move.

Hill's wild and highly recommended credits include one-of-a-kind horror oddity Spider Baby, women-in-prison films The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage, back-to-back Pam Grier-gets-revenge blaxploitation epics Coffy (duh, we're getting to it in a second) and Foxy Brown (which includes one of my all-time favorite opening credit sequences), cheerleadersploitation classic The Swinging Cheerleaders, and possibly the only women street gang film loosely adapted from Othello, Switchblade Sisters. Lesser-known Hill films include vampire movie Blood Bath (partly directed by another great AIP filmmaker, Stephanie Rothman, who is sadly not that fond of her own films even though they're fantastic), sexploitation weirdie Mondo Keyhole (co-directed with John Lamb), drag racing movie Pit Stop, and his last feature, the post-Conan sword-and-sorcery fantasy Sorceress.

Hill was not a fan of Sorceress and asked Corman to remove his directing credit because he was unhappy with Corman's drastic reduction of the planned budget, the shady financiers who ended up backing the film, the dubbing of dialogue after filming, the lackluster special effects, and Corman's veto of Sid Haig in one of the roles because of Haig's requested fee. The film was credited to the fictional Brian Stuart on initial release. I wish we had more Jack Hill films, and it's sad that his last one so far is his biggest disappointment, but the majority of his filmography is well worth your time if you love '60s and '70s drive-in movies.

Coffy, possibly Hill's splatteriest movie, features two of Hill's most frequent collaborators, the aforementioned Pam Grier and Sid Haig. Grier plays the lead, the titular Coffy (pun intended? so many topless scenes in this one), a nurse in a hospital emergency ward. Coffy is in a near-fugue state of anger and revenge because her sister LuBelle (Karen Williams), a heroin addict, has been sold some contaminated dope that left her in a state of greatly diminished mental capacity in a group home. Coffy decides to give the dope dealers a taste of vigilante justice since the corrupt cops and politicians are in on the take and can't (and won't) stop the flow of heroin into the inner city. This revenge spree is initially satisfying, but the guilt of committing uncharacteristic violent acts leaves Coffy discombobulated, especially in light of her relationship with congressional candidate Howard Brunswick (Booker Bradshaw) and friendship with her ex, last of the good cops Carter (William Elliott).

A quick aside about the wild lives of Bradshaw and Elliott. Elliott, besides being an actor, was a jazz drummer and the two-time ex-husband of Dionne Warwick. (He was in the middle of his second marriage to Warwick while Coffy was filmed.) Bradshaw was bored out of his mind after high school, working at his father's insurance company in Richmond, Virginia, so he decided to do everything. That's barely hyperbole. He went to Harvard, worked as a background singer on a TV variety show, befriended Joan Baez and sang with her at Carnegie Hall, worked for Motown and served as the European tour manager for The Temptations and The Supremes, got into acting and studied at the Royal Academy in London, worked as an actor in theater, television, and film, and enjoyed a parallel career as a TV writer, writing episodes of Planet of the Apes, Columbo, The Jeffersons, Good Times, The Rockford Files, The Richard Pryor Show, Diff'rent Strokes, and Gimme a Break!.

Back to Coffy. As upset as she is by her own vigilantism, she can't stop. She goes undercover as the newest addition to pimp and heroin supplier King George's (Robert DoQui) stable of high class sex workers (using a terrible fake Jamaican accent that she quickly drops after a couple scenes) to get close to George and his business partner, gangster Arturo Vitroni (Allan Arbus) and his right-hand goon Omar (Sid Haig). Soon, Coffy sows division in the ranks of George's women and between George and Vitroni, and all hell breaks loose. Coffy soon finds out that the river of big money and corruption tied to the drug supply flows further upward than even she imagined.

This is one of Jack Hill's grimiest, most violent, most rough-and-ready, and least gracefully composed films, driven by a relentless energy and Pam Grier's fierce performance. Heads (and other body parts) get blown off  by shotguns, bats and clubs pummel skulls, razors slash hands and faces, cars drag bodies behind them and ram into other bodies at high rates of speed, people are engulfed in flames, hair is pulled, dresses are ripped, salad bowls are slammed into faces. In between the violence, breasts are exposed about once every three minutes, butts every thirty.

Roger Corman gets his sex and violence quota fulfilled in Coffy before the opening credits even appear, and that quota is met about 38 more times over the course of its 90 minutes. I have little problem with this. Can I quibble with certain moments? Yes. (The car dragging scene is particularly tough to watch post-James Byrd Jr.) Do I enjoy sex and violence in film? Also yes. I'm no puritan. There is a modern over-correction to institutional exploitation that is mostly operating with good intentions but has led to a lot of sanitized, self-censoring, samey, and tepid 21st century art and entertainment. We could all use an injection of tasteless sleaze once in a while. We are all still horny and bloodthirsty cretins, no matter how often we pretend otherwise.

Coffy is a notch below Jack Hill at his best, but it's a rowdy, entertaining, and intense movie with a great cast, delightfully oddball characters, a pretty good Roy Ayers soundtrack that plays like a lower budget pastiche of Curtis Mayfield's Superfly and Isaac Hayes' Shaft scores, a thrilling final third, and a whole lot of funky '70s clothes, carpet, and wallpaper. I enjoyed it when I watched it in the '90s, and I enjoyed it again last night. 

Phenomena aka Creepers (Dario Argento, 1985)

One of the last peak-strength Dario Argento films (I think '87's Opera is his last really good movie, though '93's Trauma has its moments and is a fascinatingly weird ride), Phenomena (also released in shortened and rearranged, many would say mangled, form in the U.S. and U.K. as Creepers) is stuffed with visual ideas, style, an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink story, some silliness, some creepiness, beautifully composed death scenes, and the usual Argento messy dream-logic narrative that bugs (no Phenomena pun intended) some viewers but is fine and dandy with me.

First things first, the cut of Phenomena I watched is the 110-minute version (the "international cut") that finally supplanted the butchered (though it has its defenders) 83-minute Creepers version when DVDs hit the scene, and it's the version you'll find most often on streaming services. There is yet another cut (Argento's preferred version, also called the "integral cut") that runs six minutes longer. That cut was initially released only in Italy and extends some of the murder sequences, with additional dialogue in a few other scenes. Synapse released a Blu-ray with all three versions in 2019.

How to describe a movie that includes serial murder, entomology, telepathic human-insect connections, an all-girls' boarding school in Switzerland named after Wagner, sleepwalking, unseen movie star dads, Jennifer Connelly, Donald Pleasence, Daria Nicolodi, Patrick Bauchau, a chimpanzee, a creepy doll, an insane asylum, severe deformities, a boat explosion, two beheadings, an incredible Bee Gees t-shirt, a single line of voice-over narration, and a score that includes contributions from Goblin, Fabio Pignatelli, Iron Maiden, Motörhead, Claudio Simonetti, Andi Sex Gang, and the Stones' Bill Wyman? To paraphrase Sandwiches of History, let's give it a go.

Phenomena is the simple story of a teenage girl from the United States, Jennifer Corvino (Jennifer Connelly), sent to an elite international girls' boarding school in Switzerland by her movie star father. Jennifer has a telepathic connection to insects and can summon them at will, and she's afflicted with a serious sleepwalking problem. Meanwhile, a serial killer is on the loose in the countryside near the school, murdering teenage girls. Two detectives, Geiger and Kurt, are on the case (played by veteran international character actor Patrick Bauchau and future horror director Michele Soavi), assisted by the wheelchair-bound entomologist and professor John McGregor (Donald Pleasence), whose expertise on insects is helping to pinpoint the date and time of death of the killer's victims.

McGregor is assisted by his pet chimpanzee, Inga (played by real chimp Tanga, which is mildly unsettling if you've seen Nope). After Inga rescues Jennifer during a sleepwalking episode in which she wanders into one of the serial killer's murders and is also nearly assaulted by a couple of teenage Eurotrash jerks, bug-loving Jennifer befriends bug-loving McGregor, and the two hatch a plan to catch the killer with the help of their beloved bugs. As is the case with most Argento films, a whole lot of other shit happens, in grand and occasionally baffling style.

The then-14-year-old Connelly really carries Phenomena, giving the audience an identifiable center that all the crazy elements can spin around. She's a worldly, determined, and feisty kid, but she's got that authentic teenage mix of naivete, innocence, insecurity, and confidence that can't be faked. She's not a 28-year-old pretending to be a high school kid. She also gets to do some wild shit, like summoning insects while being brightly lit while her hair ripples in the wind. Her performance was trashed by U.S. critics in '85, but that may have more to do with the choppiness of the 83-minute cut, the still-prevalent in the '80s Italian practice of dubbing in all the dialogue and sound after the completion of filming, and mainstream critics' general condescension toward horror and any film with an unconventional approach to plot. Middlebrow jokers. 

It's always a pleasure to see Donald Pleasence, and he's got genuine chemistry with the chimp. You can't fake chimp chemistry. It's there or it isn't. ("That's what you get for not hailing to the chimp!") It's also always a pleasure to see the late, great Daria Nicolodi, but her and Argento's relationship was on the rocks during filming. They broke up shortly after the film was released, with Nicolodi calling Phenomena reactionary because of its depiction of people with disabilities and vowing never to work with Argento again. They eventually patched up some of their differences, and Nicolodi appeared in Argento's Mother of Tears in 2007. They were reportedly on good terms at the time of her death in 2020, but I don't know any of these people personally, so who knows? I do know that this is the only Argento/Nicolodi film where Nicolodi has unflattering hair and wardrobe (and terrible glasses). Not sure if the character was written that way or if it's an act of passive aggression from Argento. (I'm trying to stir up some TMZ-style gossip about two people, one dead and one 81 years old, on the set of a 37-year-old movie.)

You know you're going to be in good hands when Argento drops a spectacular opening scene. Using both the natural beauty and ominous foreboding of the isolated Swiss countryside, he kills off his daughter Fiore (who mostly works behind the camera as a production designer), here playing a tourist who misses her bus and wanders to the wrong place for help. Argento has orchestrated some of the most stunningly beautiful murder scenes in film history, and this is one of his best. (Any time you see the black-gloved hands of a killer in an Argento film, you're seeing Argento's hands.)

The ensuing film is almost as stylish, and Argento presides over a lot of eye- and ear-popping visual and aural biz, making the most of wind machines, spotlights, a smorgasbord of music, and a camera that knows when and where to move to keep up with the wild turns of the narrative. Yeah, there are occasional brief lulls and plot holes and goofy lines of dialogue, but this is mostly a thrillingly strange and compelling movie, with concluding scenes that begin at over the top and keep shooting upward from there. I'm not going to pretend Phenomena is the equal of Suspiria, but it's pretty damn satisfying.