Slaughter's Big Rip-Off

It's time again to play my favorite 1970s movie game, "Is it Blaxploitation?"  I had never heard of Slaughter's Big Rip-Off before I watched it, so it took me a while to answer that question.  The title sequence featured several freeze frames of inconsequential importance; that's not great filmmaking, but not necessarily Blaxploitation.  The soundtrack features funky beats and horns, courtesy of the Godfather of Soul, James Brown; that's awesome and the funk element does lend itself to "urban" 70s audiences...so, looking good.  Pimps and hos are featured prominently, supplying plot points and gratuitous nudity; now we're getting into Blaxploitation country!  The main character is a bad-ass black man who takes no guff from any man and the villains are primarily rich white men; DING DING DING!!!  We have a winnah!  Blaxploitation it is!

The movie begins with Slaughter (football legend Jim Brown) at a picnic, having a good time with some friends and (presumably) family.  The good times end when a propeller plane fires a machine gun at the picnic, killing several innocent people.  The plane leaves unscathed, but Slaughter knows that they were gunning for him.  How does he know?  Maybe it's a leftover plot thread from the previous entry in this series, Slaughter.  Or maybe Slaughter just knows stuff because he's Jim Effin' Brown.  Don't worry your pretty little head; it's never explained.  Slaughter obviously has to take the law into his own hands, so he packs his pistol and starts busting heads, looking for an answer.  He gets some grief from a straight-arrow cop (played by Brock Peters), but they eventually come to an understanding; if Slaughter helps the cop get a secret list of policemen taking bribes, then Slaughter can do things his way, unhindered.  And by "unhindered," I of course mean "by shooting people in the face."

Meanwhile, we meet the evil mastermind behind Slaughter's problems.  When I saw his name pop up in the credits, I assumed that there must be another person with his name, but no, Ed McMahon is the villain of this film.  Sadly, he does not laugh or tell anyone they are correct, sir.  He hired a guy to kill Slaughter, and was surprised when the airplane-based hit didn't work.  McMahon had the assassin killed by another killer; he died by inner tube.  There are other minor villains, too.  Since Slaughter is a stand-up dude, he obviously has no respect for pimps and drug dealers.  But the pimp in this movie (Dick Anthony Williams) was pretty awesome; he gave his hos a lecture that consists of him asking over and over again "Do you bitches unnerstaaan?"  And his fashion sense cannot be understated. 

Obviously, this is a dumb movie with little to no plot, beyond the understanding that Slaughter kicks major ass.  Gordon Douglas' directing isn't terrible, but Jim Brown is no Oscar winner; still, he's a more viable double threat than his fellow actor/athletes Michael Jordan and Shaquille O'Neal.  Brown's emotional range is about as wide as his shoulders --- not bad for shoulders, but still lacking for drama.  Still, this isn't a movie you watch to appreciate the craftsmanship.  This is a low-level action movie that keeps the action coming.  It's funny to hear Ed McMahon talking tough, and there are a lot of lines that probably sounded awesome at the time, but are now firmly set in the realm of awesomely bad.  As far as Blaxploitation goes, this is actually a pretty solid movie.  It's not boring, certainly, and Brown is certainly credible as the guy you don't want to mess with.  Maybe that's why the plot is practically nonexistent; the writer didn't want to mess with Brown, so they filmed without a story.  Again, that's not a huge problem for a movie like this.  If the lines were a touch funnier or Slaughter did one or two more ridiculous things, I would give the film major props.  It is entirely possible that this is a film that can grow on you with multiple viewings (there were a lot of amusing lines), but for now I'll say it's only decent.

Coffy

You aren't going to find the words "smart" and "blaxploitation" in the same sentence too often.  There's a good reason for this.  Blaxploitation films were made quickly and cheaply, with little time spent on the writing, directing, or editing of the films.  Coffy is actually one of the better blaxploitation films, but it obviously suffers from a low budget and terrible script.  Many blaxploitation staples are present here, so pull out your scorecard and check 'em off...

• Black drug dealers/pimps
• The white man trying to keep the black man down
• Gratuitous nudity
• Funk beats and waka-chicka guitars
• Soundtrack songs that explain the plot
• Racist white villains

Yep, all present and accounted for!  Of course, with all those qualities present in the movie, it can't be that bad, can it?

Coffy (Pam Grier) is a nurse whose young sister got hooked on drugs (heroin, I think) and is now mostly comatose.  Coffy handles the situation the best she can; she pretends to be a junkie willing to exchange sex for drugs and shoots her sister's dealer in the face with a shotgun.  All's well that ends well, right?  Actually, the movie keeps going for another eighty minutes because Coffy keeps finding new bad guys to kill.  To track down the baddies, Coffy does the most sensible thing she can do: she poses as a high class Jamaican prostitute, just to get time alone with the men she holds responsible for the local drug trade.  That doesn't always work well; she spends almost a third of the movie in captivity after she fails to kill a white kingpin.  Overall, though, her strategy works pretty well.

This isn't a movie that would translate well into a book.  Writer/director Jack Hill's script was pretty bad at the time and hasn't aged well in the last 30+ years.  Luckily, a lot of its jive talk has gone from cool to lame and is now in the humorously quaint category, so it's actually kind of fun to hear nowadays.  To give you an example of some of the quality writing here, ask yourself what you would do to disguise yourself as a Jamaican prostitute.  Was your answer "Just add 'mon' to the end of all my sentences"?  If it was, you missed your calling writing blaxploitation screenplays.

The movie obviously has a low budget, which isn't necessarily a bad thing.  While Coffy's weapon of choice is a shotgun, you see precious little blood, even when she shoots a man in a swimming pool.  And the guys she shoots in the crotch...well, it's probably better that they didn't have the money to show that.  I actually think Coffy does a good job with the action, despite the low budget.  While seeing some fake blood would have made the movie a little better, it wouldn't have made a huge difference overall; the key was Coffy having a kick-ass attitude, which Grier definitely delivers.

I have a few unanswered questions after viewing this film.  Sid Haig's character is an enforcer for a drug kingpin.  He is supposed to take Coffy out somewhere, give her an overdose, and leave her to die.  Instead, he injects her with the drugs (actually, it's sugar that Coffy swapped for the drugs.  Shh!!!  Don't tell Sid!) and then tries to have consensual sex with her.  That's right.  He's preparing to have sex with a woman that might die during the act.  Eww.  I mean, classy.

And what's with the bad guy that is wearing glasses, but one of the lenses is blackened out?  I'm not stupid, I get that the dude is missing an eye, but he's missing out on an amazing opportunity that totally would have been boss in the 1970s.  He should have worn a monocle and an eye patch.  I swear, I'm not a Hollywood stylist, but sometimes I get inspiration.

Look, the movie's not very good.  The dialogue is terrible, the acting is amateurish and the direction is nonexistent.  And yet, the first half of the movie is pretty entertaining.  Pam Grier is a sassy woman and there is a lot of violence and a lot of gratuitous nudity.  Sure, the movie gets boring for the 30 or 40 minutes where it delivers all of its exposition, but that's a relatively small price to pay.  The awesomeness of Pam Grier more or less cancels out the awfulness of the rest of the movie.