p e n g u i n d e v i l

I watched Coffy today! Always an entertaining way to spend an hour and a half, as it is a great AIP classic and an exciting Pam Grier ‘sploitation movie! Filled with all of that great 70’s Jack Hill stuff: gratuitous nudity, gun play, beatings from guys in ski-masks, pimps, dealers, cops on the take, a bunch of high-class hookers in a food fight… And it’s all thrown together in a moralistic personal revenge movie! Pam plays Miss Coffin, a nurse whose younger sister got involved in the drug scene and it ended her up in the hospital. Of course, for this, Coffy goes on a revenge spree that takes her from the street dealers to the plush condo of King George (the big pimp around town) and beyond. When she sets off on this path, so has no idea the heights to which her vengeance needs to go to make things right. And along on this trip she involves her ex-boyfriend, a good cop named Carter, and her politically powerful lover Brunswick… And it doesn’t turn out well for either of them. But she knows no bounds to what she’ll say or do to accomplish this task, starting right off the bat with the grisly double murder of the small time dealers who supplied her sister with junk.

She can gets away with this because she’ll do anything she has to and because no one can resist her charms, not even good old Sid Haig, whose character Omar’s weakness for her is the final mistake the bad guys make. But there are lots of fun characters, and I even felt a bit sorry for King George, who is a fun and charming character, as generally are those stereotyped 70’s pimps, but his memorable death scene is quite unsettling, since he didn’t seem to be all that bad for a pimp/dealer and was set up by conniving old Coffy!

But Pam is great! Coffy is a perfect Grier role, tempestuous, focussed, ruthless, quite an eyeful and yet a caring and emotional character.  She kicks a#% all over the place, being quite comfortable under the covers, or with her fingers around a broken bottle or on the trigger of a shotgun. And the soundtrack by Roy Ayers is a great piece of old 70’s film funk. Elinor started dancing to it as soon as the opening credits started rolling. The trouble with these movies is that you can’t watch just one!