Coffy

Coffy works as a nurse by day. Her young sister becomes addicted on cut heroin and ends up in hospital. Coffy waits for nobody. She starts with the dealer and works her way up the chain, and at the end of it she finds politicians. The film is not interested in revenge. It is interested in the completeness of the system: no institution in it is clean, the police and the politicians belong to the same network, and that is what Coffy learns. Her method of getting inside in disguise follows from it. The form is cheap and fast: street shooting, hard cutting, Roy Ayers' funk score and the blaxploitation conventions of the period. Jack Hill wrote and directed. AIP held the budget at five hundred thousand dollars and the shoot was finished in eighteen days in Los Angeles; the aim was to open before Warner Bros' bigger Cleopatra Jones, and the film won that race. Pam Grier leads, in the first film she carried alone; Sid Haig is in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like seventies genre cinema, funk and Pam Grier. Who it is not for: anyone troubled by scenes where sex and violence are used for exploitation. The film carries every habit of its genre.