Coffy is fun movie because of many things.
The score by Roy Ayers features a great combination of soul vocals with funky jazz music. The themes are macro and focus on how politicians are in it for themselves as soon as they get power. Coffy learns the same thing by the end of the movie. Throughout different times in the film she kills for revenge and self defense and by the end she feels better about it because she is killing someone who in her eyes deserves it rather than just a pusher trying to make money in the beginning. I think there are some interesting things to analyze there. Pam Grier's lines are endlessly quotable and this movie makes her an even stronger character by never making it seem exploitative. Coffy uses her sexuality and wit to get what she wants but she never gets taken advantage of, and she is vulnerable which makes her a multidimensional character. I think the pacing suffers a little bit in the middle when Coffy is captive but it heats up again as soon as she escapes.
The film starts with a mob boss and a drug pusher getting lured to house by Coffy.
She pretends to be a prostitute who will give them anything but while one isn't looking she takes out a shotgun. This is the beginning of some of her quotable lines. She kills the mob boss by shooting him and forces the pusher to overdose on drugs. She blames the pusher for the ailing state of her little sister LuBelle who was hooked drugs at a young age. After killing these two men Coffy is visibly shaken and can't stabilize someone for surgery as she works as a nurse. Coffy meets with her cop ex-boyfriend, Carter (William Elliott) who brings news of the crime she just committed. Coffy goes to meet her current boyfriend, City Councilman Howard Brunswick (Booker Bradshaw). Brunswick is going to run for senator. Meanwhile someone tries to get a picture of Howard and District Attorney Ramos (Ruben Moreno). A one eyed man (John Perak) threatens the waitress taking the picture with a knife. More on this later.
Coffy has a talk with Carter about how she believes that police don't go after big criminals because they are all on the take or they know someone who is. Carter explains to her that a man named Vitroni (Alan Arbus) is taking over the crime operations in Los Angeles and Carter's partner is on the take from Vitroni and a big time pimp named King George (Robert DeQui). Carter refuses to join him. His apartment is broken into by thugs and him and Coffy are both assaulted. Carter suffers permanent brain damage. At this point Coffy resolves to get her vengeance for Carter. She goes to see a former patient named Priscilla (Carol Locatell) who works for King George. She threatens her with a broken glass bottle to tell where King George's stash is. Coffy meanwhile poses as a Jamaican prostitute to infiltrate King George's racket. She does so and gets into a fight with the other prostitutes in the presence of Vitroni who wants to spend the night with her. After Vitroni demeans her she prepares to kill him but is whacked from behind by the two men who went to Carter's house. One of them is Sid Haig playing Omar. Coffy lies and says that King George ordered the hit.
Sid Haig as Omar
Omar ties a noose around King George attached to a car and eventually kills him with the objects he runs into. Coffy is shown tied up in a shed. She is shown making a weapon out of one of her hair pins. Later Vitroni has a meeting with Ramos, the One Eyed Man, and surprise...Howard. He brings in Coffy to test Howard's loyalty saying he is okay with killing her to move up in the world. Coffy is about be injected with a lethal dose of drugs but switches the drugs and lures Omar outside of the car under pretense of having sex with him. She stabs Omar with her hair pain. The two corrupt cops assigned to her are also killed. One by getting ran over while pursuing Coffy. The other is killed in explosion after an accident while chasing her. Coffy takes a car and goes back to the house where the meeting was and kills everyone. Virtoni tells her where Howard is hiding as she says she will let him live, but doesn't. She goes to Howard's beach house and kills him after he begs for forgiveness. She is about to accept, when a naked white woman comes out of Howard's bathroom she he isn't too broken up about losing Coffy. The movie ends with Coffy walking on the beach.
I like that this movie never goes full on exploitation. There are exploitative scenes but this movie goes full on rape-revenge or something like that. Yes you see Pam Grier topless plenty of times which is great, but it never feels like she is forced to that. It feels like a means to an end. She retaliates on Vitroni after he demeans her by calling her the N-word and spitting on her. She never gets to the point of actually having sex with Omar, stabbing him well before that. She never does anything with the two criminals at the beginning of the movie. Her being strong and never being exploited, while also showing some struggles with her own actions at the hospital makes her a more human character. She is much better written than female characters of many of today's movies who are strong and fine with killing while going through nothing at all. The scene where Coffy beats up the other women is the only scene that seem exploitative but it still has a purpose of getting her with Vitroni and shows how competent of a fighter she is.
There are many scenes I love as well. The scene where Omar puts a noose on King George can be seen as funny but at a certain point I started to think about how that kind of stuff actually happened in hate crimes. This movie actually does stuff like that quite a bit. The one prostitute Coffy beats up a lot is now more vulnerable than ever before. While Coffy does a lot of things to help herself and eliminate criminals we don't know what the women will do now either. So there are questions about what she is doing really being right or not. When she goes afte Priscilla, Priscilla's face had been cut by King George and her girlfriend comes in mad that another woman came to their house. At the beginning of the movie, while Sugarman and his pusher were criminals, the pusher is treated as less than by Sugarman. So there is this criminal hierarchy this movie talks about and later how Howard is just a person who is becoming apart of that structure.
Whenever blood is needed in this movie it really well done. The awesome squibs when Coffy shoots Ramos at the end, the arcing shot of blood from Omar's throat when he is stabbed, and the wounds on the guy that is operated on the beginning. Also that brief shot of Coffy blowing off Sugarman's head at the beginning. I loved the way the violence looked in this movie. It added to the feel as well. This movie has an element of funniness to it but it never goes full on and by making the deaths real it adds to the authenticity. Pam Grier is exce
Howard is your typical power hungry politician under the guise of actually doing things for the people. How many politicians are like this? Ones that when they get notoriety and power leave behind the exact people they promised to help or those that got them there. I like comparing his two speeches. One to the people at a rally and one to Coffy at the end:
"Where do you think that $100 a day goes? Oh, sure, part of it goes to black pushers and distributors. But, the main part of it - the really big part - goes to those white men who import the narcotics. And the big part goes to those white men who corrupt our law enforcement agencies. And the big part goes to those white men who draft our black boys and send them over to Indo-China - to protect other white men who are the original suppliers of the narcotics. So, you see this whole thing becomes a vicious attempt as a part of the white power structure to exploit our black men and women in this society."
Now his quote at the end: "Black people want dope and brown people want dope, and as long as people are deprived of a decent life, they're gonna want something just to plain feel good with. And nothings gonna change that - except money and power. And that's what I'm after, baby. Power - to change things for our people. I want to get all that money back into the hands of black people."
The problem is people and Coffy have been killed, or so he thinks while he is trying to get that power for himself. Howard is just like anyone else lying to people about what is really doing. He is just as much a part of that structure as anyone. This movie is about Coffy learning just that. By the end she seems content with who she has killed instead of being sick like at the beginning. She sees by the end that people like Howard and Virtoni are the real ones responsible for her sister's addiction and ailments. It is interesting the company he starts keeping is the white men are part of that power structure. He is just as helpless to stop them when he is the corrupt one. Carter can't stop them as an honest cop, so Coffy's way is the best way, but it is still against the law and normally most people can't go against the law kill everyone from a power structure. This movie makes you think two things: Yes Coffy avenged her sister and yes she killed some people at the top but as long as drugs and money are two things struggling people want people can profit off that it will always be around. It will also never bring her sister back. So there is a bittersweetness to this ending as Coffy now has no one even though she accomplished what she wanted to.
Rating: 9/10
Trivia: When asked why she did so many nude scenes and this film and others Pam Grier said,
"When asked about why she chose to do so many nude scenes in this and other films, Pam Grier. said, "Being nude in those movies, I was trying to help men understand. Society created this mystery about the vagina, the breasts. When you create a mystery, people want to see it and attack it if they can't have it. So I was like, 'Here's the mystery. I hope I bore you and you'll never get a hard-on again'."
Vitroni's house was actually Roy Rogers' real life house.
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