Foxy Brown (1974)

One of the things that sets Jack Hill apart from his exploitation bretheren is his ability to both go way over the top with the melodrama and maintain a wry sense of humor. He doesn't make comedies exactly, but he doesn't play the material as seriously as a heart attack either. Above all, his films are entertaining as hell. And this is probably why Foxy Brown has become such a cult classic: it has a playful sense of humor. It also has a strong female character at its center played by the great Pam Grier who is, indeed, "one hell of a woman".

Foxy Brown was originally intended to be a sequel to Coffy, which was a successful film but for some reason the studio opted against making a sequel. Nowadays studios plan to make sequels before the movie comes out and then make a bunch even if nobody saw the original! But this explains why we never know what Foxy Brown's job is: she was supposed to be a nurse. Now her brother (played by the great Antonio Fargas) is a drug using motherfucker, which is more important to the story. Fargas might not be the greatest actor and Grier was not yet the actress she would later become, but they were both already interesting to watch. This is something else I learned about low budget exploitation filmmaking directly from Jack Hill: Your actors don't have to be good if they are really interesting to watch. Sometimes that's even better. A perfect example of this is Robbie Lee in Switchblade Sisters: she's not so much acting as gritting her teeth and yelling, but damned if you can take your eyes off of her.

Pam Grier, meanwhile, was an actress who just needed time to learn her craft, but again had the charisma to carry a film. Here, she's Foxy Brown, a woman whose boyfriend is an undercover narc who has undergone radical plastic surgery to change his face and avoid the drug dealers who want to ice him. The problem is Link, Foxy's brother, who is in trouble with the dealers and looking for a way to rectify that situation. You can imagine what happens, although it's still a pretty shocking betrayal in the film. Link is clearly in the grip of drug addiction and the film is pretty heavily anti-drugs (or at least hard drugs) with the message that drugs are a new means to enslave the black community. It's a pretty heavy message for an exploitation film, but totally legitimate.

Now, Foxy has to get revenge on the white motherfuckers who killed her man. At the top of the heap is Miss Katherine, who runs a brothel among other things. She's played by Kathryn Loder, who definitely embodies the Hill type of villian- again, it's not great acting so much as being able to chew the scenery like it was Juicy Fruit. In order to get her vengeance, Foxy goes undercover as a hooker in the mob's brothel, dive bombs a drug shack with an ultralight plane, gets help from the always great Sid Haig, and there's a lesbian bar fight for no good reason aside from general awesomeness. It's pretty clear why Foxy Brown is such a cult classic- it's just a hell of a lot of fun. It's also, incidentally, a movie about the sort of smart, strong, badass woman that they still don't make many films about.

The Big Bird Cage (1972)

Ah, the women-in-prison movie: perfect for those who like their T&A mixed with a little despair. There’s always a group shower scene, nearly always a scene in which the fire hose is turned on rioting prisoners in white tee-shirts, usually a few mean lesbians of the lipstick variety, a few catfights, some sexually abusive guards, and a climatic riot in which those cruel guards get what’s coming to them. The politics of these movies are pretty unambiguous: prisons are warehouses for abuse that not only fail to rehabilitate prisoners, but make them worse; on the bright side, they have group showers.

One can forgive Jack Hill for following these conventions in The Big Bird Cage; after all, he basically invented the genre the year before with The Big Dollhouse- this is the sequel. That was the most successful independent movie ever made at that point, so imitators followed quickly. A rather brilliant idea on Hill’s part was to play up the outrageous aspects of the newly-born genre in the sequel and fail to take any of its conventions seriously. In a lot of ways, this is the more entertaining film

Hill also had a great cast. Exploitation flick royalty Sid Haig and Pam Grier play Django and Blossom, left-wing revolutionaries of the sort that are hardly found in movies after the 70s. Haig and Grier play the characters to the hilt: he as a layabout who’d rather drink wine than start a revolution and she as a fiery ass-kicker who just wants to shoot her machine gun. The plot involves the two trying to jumpstart a revolution in a women’s prison in the Philippines. Their fellow revolutionaries need women after all.

Meanwhile, Django and Blossom’s attempted stick up in a casino has led to trouble for the irascible American sybarite Terry Rich, played up by fashion model Anitra Ford. Having slept with half the government, embarrassing the state, Rich is thrown into prison after the revolutionaries attempt to take her for a hostage. She’s a great character, haughty, superior, and lascivious. In spite of being spoiled and imperious, she soon wins over the fellow prisoners- in a nice campy touch, they take to her after deciding she’s more of a whore than a political prisoner

Other standouts include Candice Roman as the sexually-frustrated Carla, Teda Bracci as the brash Bull Jones, Carol Speed as the ‘ho enthusiast Mickie, and towering fashion model Karen McKevic as the also towering Karen. In a clever touch, meanwhile, the lead guards are flaming gays, which is played for laughs but was supposedly well-received by gays at the time- I suppose because the comedy isn’t particularly mean-spirited. At one point, Haig infiltrates the camp by playing gay in scenes that are really too silly to be offensive. Similarly over the top is a scene in which the head guard Rocco, played by Vic Diaz, is raped by the horny rioting inmates.

And, yes, there is the inevitable riot. One does wonder how hard it would have been for the women to break out much earlier, since the prison cells are made of thatched grass and the prisoners aren’t chained. But, okay, the final conflict is action-packed, although probably too many of the characters get killed off, which adds an unnecessarily somber tone to a fairly silly movie. In general, the ending is a bit of a let-down. Nevertheless, the film moves well, the characters are memorable, and there is a lot of violence and nudity, so it’s easy to see why The Big Bird Cage has become a favorite of exploitation film enthusiasts.

Pit Stop (1968)

Jack Hill was having great difficulty getting his great film Spider Baby released when he agreed to shoot this car racing film for Roger Corman. He claimed to hate racing and wanting to make an art film; but also wanting to chronicle the "Americana" of "figure 8 racing", in which the cars race on a track in the shape of a figure 8, naturally. This means that they're racing through an open intersection, which is basically insane. As racer Hawk Sidney (played by Sid Haig), puts it, "you got to be a little dinky!"

Haig steals the movie as an arrogant, obsessed racer trying to hang onto his prime job racing for promoter Grant Willard (played by Brian Donlevy). The "hero" is Rick Bowman (played by Dick Davalos), a street-racer who gets drafted into figure-8 racing and competes with Hawk and everyone else. Donlevy looks sort of like a femme hoodlum, in the style of Elvis or a regular at a lesbian bar. He's corrupted by his competitive instinct and Willard's scummy machinations. The great thing about the movie is that he's pretty corrupt from the beginning and just gets worse.

Other highlights include the figure 8 races that all turn into demolition derbies, an early performance by Ellen Burstyn (credited here as Ellen McRae), and near-constant acid rock by The Daily Flash. Like all of Hill's movies, it's a blast. Fans of car racing, acid rock, Sid Haig, or Elvis-lookalike lesbians shouldn't miss it!