Pure action film nirvana, “Coffy” has got to be one of the slickest pieces of entertainment ever created, not to mention the penultimate “Blaxploitation” cinema experience. It’s a credit to everyone involved in the film that the story could be so gratuitously nonsensical and contrived and still seem completely logical while it’s happening. It’s like a comic book come to life.
Pam Grier plays Coffy, a nurse who goes on a murderous rampage after her sister overdoses on drugs supplied by a “pusher” who knows that Coffy is sending her money. From the opening scene, where Coffy pulls a severely-sawed-off shotgun out of her macramé purse to blast a big-time drug dealer to hell, the frantic pace never lets up until the bitter, seething end.
After making her first “hit”, Coffy’s vengeance is further stoked when her do-good cop friend is taken out by the dirty dealers for not accepting a payoff. Coffy blows her top and takes some time off work to really go for the jugular, working her way through the city’s drug cartel by posing as a Jamaican hooker named “Mystique”. It’s not hard–she gets the vital information in a hilarious scene involving a woman named Priscilla, whose “old man,” Harriet, turns out to be more than Coffy bargained for.
The genius in the film is in the way that Coffy manages to manipulate her way through all of these scenarios. Even the hardest criminals are putty in her hands, and she never looks more beautiful than when she is covered in scratches, grime, and wielding a shotgun. She has a seemingly endless bag of tricks, several of which involve weapons hidden in her astonishing afro. She’s comfortable around a gun, but she’ll use any old thing lying around to wreak her vengeance: a broken wine bottle, a hypodermic needle full of dope, a makeshift shiv, even a convenient rock lying on the side of the road.
By the time the climax rolls around, the film has become deliriously exciting, building continuously upwards until you think it might collapse in on itself. But it doesn’t. “Coffy” stands tall, even over the strains of a closing song that tells us “Revenge is a virtue.” This film is nearly perfect in every way.
