Rating: 4/5
Cult Movie Challenge 2017 | 34/52 | American International Pictures
When was the last time I laughed?
Grover walks through a happening club to his boss, Sugarman. Grover brought Sugarman a strung-out chick who would do anything to get a fix, and she was waiting in Sugarman’s car. Grover drives them back to his place while Sugarman gets in with the girl. Back at Grover’s place, Grover preps some heroin. Sugarman turns off the lights, and the girl pulls a sawed-off shotgun out of her bag. She shoots Sugarman in the face and takes a prepped needle off him. She corners Grover in the bathroom and introduces herself: her name is Coffy, and her sister is LuBelle, an 11-year-old Grover got hooked on smack. So, Coffy adds on top of what Grover’s already injected in himself, causing him to OD.
Coffy returns to her job as a nurse at the emergency room, shaken up but determined. But her shakiness is too much, and the doctor sends her out. Officer McHenry and his new partner, Officer Carter Brown, show up at the hospital to follow up on the OD that came in that night. Carter sees Coffy, with whom he had a fling when they were both kids. He still wants to date her, but Coffy’s dating Howard Brunswick, a city councilman. Carter tells Coffy about the bizarre case they’re on: a junkie shot his hookup and then OD’d. But Carter thinks it’s other drug dealers trying to encroach on the area.
Coffy brings Carter with her the next day to a juvenile rehabilitation center to see LuBelle. He drops her off at home, where a car waits to take her to a nightclub, where Howard meets with Captain Reuben Ramos, the deputy commissioner. Howard announces his plan to run for Congress, so he and Coffy return to his place to celebrate. Later, Coffy gets off her shift at the hospital. Carter finds her distraught and brings her to his place for coffee. An officer calls Carter to get him in with a drug kingpin named Vitroni, but Carter refuses and threatens to turn him in. The cop sends a couple of cronies to beat up Carter and incapacitate Coffy.
With Carter, the one good cop she knows, in the hospital and irrevocably crippled, Coffy finds her resolve renewed to find the bastards responsible and take them down.
I'm gonna piss on your grave tomorrow.
Like all vigilante movies I’ve seen, the film questions the efficacy of the police in handling these drug cases. Coffy and Carter want justice, but what that looks like for each differs. Coffy would kill a drug dealer to get them off the street, but Carter sees the chain, and a dealer is just one link in it. Coffy suspects the cops are getting some action from these drug deals. Carter doesn’t deny that—an officer tries to get Carter in on it, but Carter threatens to turn the cop in for it.
Like heroin on the body, Coffy’s revenge murders haunt her mind. She believes she did the right thing, but the images won’t leave her head. But what also haunts her are images of LuBelle.
Roy Ayers’s score is perfect. His blend of jazz and funk is the perfect tone for a film focusing on a morally ambiguous vigilante. It isn’t pervasive, as the film takes a more subdued and realistic approach (at least, initially—once the plot kicks in, stuff gets more outrageous).
The film came out a couple of years after Nixon kicked off his never-ending war on drugs—a total failure of a political measure that nevertheless continues to infringe on personal liberties while increasing funding for law enforcement and prisons. Notably, the film takes the less popular anti-drug stance, which may have contributed to its poor performance. But it does so by looking at the white power structure that reinforces class and race divide by punishing the people of color caught in the middle.
Jack Hill scrapped the planned sequel because of the film’s middling reception and made Foxy Brown instead. This film may not have been the break for Pam Grier that Hill anticipated, but with it and Foxy Brown, Grier became a household name—the first woman action star and the face of blaxploitation for the rest of the 1970s.