FOXY BROWN (director/writer:Jack Hill; cinematographer: Brick Marquard; editor: Chuck McClelland; music: Willie Hutch; cast: Foxy Brown (Pam Grier), Link Brown (Antonio Fargas), Peter Brown (Steve Ellas), Michael Anderson (Terry Carter), Kathryn Loder (Katherine Wall), Judge Fenton (Harry Holcombe), Sid Haig (Hays), Juanita Brown (Claudia), Fred Lerner (Bunyan), Tony Giorgio (Eddie), Bob Minor (Oscar); Runtime: 94; MPAA Rating: R; producer: Buzz Feitshans; American International Pictures; 1974)
“Sleazy blaxploitation film from the 70s.”
Reviewed by Dennis Schwartz
Sleazy blaxploitation film from the 70s that’s built around big busted Pam Grier as Foxy Brown knocking you over with her brown sugar and spice. It’s writer-director Jack Hill’s follow-up to his commercially successful Coffy, which also featured Pam. Foxy lacks the fine subversive quality of the other film, instead it resorts to being an uninteresting revenge film with plenty of violence and cheap thrills aimed at satisfying its mostly black audience. All the whites featured are either bigots, whores or vile criminals.
Things begin to pop when Foxy’s good-guy undercover narcotics agent boyfriend Michael Anderson gets killed by a drug gang when Foxy’s good-for-nothing kid brother Link (Antonio Fargas) fingers him. Link, a shifty drug dealer, owes the white mob 20,000 dollars he borrowed to see if he can start a numbers racket, and in this way he squares himself with the mob since he doesn’t have the coin to pay them back and they have threatened to pummel him.
Foxy dedicates herself to getting revenge on the nasty white mobsters, and goes after the twisted white woman gang leader (Kathryn Loder), who is a bitchy madam as well as a big-time heroin dealer, her boyfriend and right-hand man (Peter Brown), and two flunky henchmen (Fred Lerner & Tony Giorgio). Foxy has to endure being called a “big-jugged jigaboo,” rapists, being drugged, and several fights with both men and women. In the end she hooks up with a neighborhood vigilante group (Black Panther-inspired) and in the climactic scene she lops off the head of a goon with an airplane propeller and encourages her men to castrate another goon.
Pam proves to be up for the role’s physicality, looks hot in every tacky outfit she adorns, handles a gun like a pro, curses with the best of ’em, can drive a Cadillac Sedan de Ville as if it were a lethal weapon and still shines as a desirable sex symbol. This one is strictly for the blaxploitation crowd and fans of Pam.
REVIEWED ON 9/18/2005 GRADE: C
Dennis Schwartz: “Ozus’ World Movie Reviews”
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