t a swingin’ California nightclub, a big, dealin’ man is drawn out to his car by a stooge who has brought him a strung-out prostitute. Despite having all the women he can manage at his disposal, this catch promises to be worth a look. “I got more tail than I can handle. I even got white tail!”

The hooker turns out to be “Coffy” Coffin (Pam Grier), a chesty medical-professional-cum-avenger whose younger sibling LuBelle (Karen Williams) became addicted to dope at the age of 11. While she works as an expert certified nurse during the day (and night), she spends her off-hours scouring the streets for drug pushers in need of a moral course-correction – in the form of a shotgun point-blank to the face. “Wouldn’t you want to kill somebody who had done a thing like that to your little sister?”

With a wealth of slimy underworld thugs and corrupt figures keeping the streets unsafe (minimal righteous roles pepper the landscape), Coffy has no shortage of targets for her brutal vigilante activities. And this film has no shortage of edgy, exploitative elements, ranging from drugs and murder to lots of cursing and racist exclamations to oodles of nudity. As an early blaxploitation classic, “Coffy” is a prime example, combining sex and bloodshed to an exceptional degree. Unlike many of the even lower-budgeted Roger Corman productions that starred Grier, this one makes the most of very little. And she’s an absolute highlight; she’s clearly more talented than this kind of trashy picture requires, though she’d go on to make quite the career in like-minded endeavors (and here, as if by contract, her breasts are exposed in virtually every other scene).

Amusingly, “Coffy” doesn’t pull any punches; its excessive, intermittently creative savagery may not always be convincing, particularly with its bright red paint for blood, but it’s consistently extreme. And it’s hard to dismiss the potency of its predominantly black cast, featuring black people in power – who lead political campaigns, who serve in law enforcement, and who are generally in control (even when they’re criminals). In this colorful, eccentric world of gangsters and cops, white folks are usually the victims or the villains, always second or third to the better-scripted, better-detailed, better-dressed leads.

Although the premise isn’t all that original, there are some idiosyncratic brutes forming a hierarchy that Coffy must work through, dishing out enjoyable reprisals – including pimp King George (Robert DoQui), mobster Arturo Vitroni (Allan Arbus), and henchmen Omar (Sid Haig, as toothy and expressive as ever) and the one-eyed Aleva (John Perak). Along the way, she also engages in some quality cat-fights – which once again conspicuously rip apart dresses to reveal heaving bosoms. And Roy Ayers’ jazzy music nicely complements the action. Written and directed by Jack Hill (who previously collaborated with Grier) for Samuel Z. Arkoff’s company, this independent, over-the-top crime-thriller may boast a curiously anti-drug message (“Smoking is dangerous to your health”) and uncomfortable themes of systemic abuse, but it chiefly presents a confident, determined, powerful, skilled, quick-thinking, wisely-manipulative female headliner who doesn’t shy away from tough confrontations. She’s a continual delight, capable and crafty and certain to win out, even when everyone is against her. The tone is serious, the harshness entertaining, the deserts grandly just (the finale is surprisingly well-written and supremely satisfying), and the star perfectly cast.

– Mike Massie