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.