Jack Hill - vo.rs

Foxy Brown: The Blaxploitation Icon at Full Force

Fri, 22 May 2026 11:00:00 +0000

American International Pictures had an accident on its hands in 1973. Coffy made more money than the studio had planned for, turned Pam Grier into a headliner and made Jack Hill its most reliable action hand, and the obvious move was a sequel. That sequel got as far as a script before AIP lost its nerve; the lot’s received wisdom held that follow-ups underperformed, so the project was reworked into a standalone with a fresh title and a heroine who happened to behave exactly like the old one. Her name was Foxy Brown, and the picture released in 1974 plays like Coffy run again at a higher temperature.

Coffy: Pam Grier and the Birth of the Action Heroine

Sun, 19 Apr 2026 11:00:00 +0000

For a certain kind of hero to exist, someone first has to prove there is an audience for her. In 1973, American cinema did not have a Black woman who could headline an action film, carry the plot alone, dispatch the villains, and walk out the other side as the undisputed centre of her own story. After Coffy, it did. Jack Hill’s tough, cheap, ferociously entertaining revenge picture made Pam Grier a star, and in doing so it created a template that action cinema is still drawing on half a century later, usually without crediting the source.

Spider Baby: The 1967 Gothic Black Comedy

Thu, 04 Sep 2025 11:00:00 +0000

Spider Baby opens with Lon Chaney Jr singing the theme song, a mock-spooky ditty about cannibals and murder delivered in the voice of an actor who by 1964 had been the Wolf Man, the Mummy, Frankenstein’s Monster and Dracula, and knew exactly how funny and how sad it was to be doing this now. That opening tells you the whole film in ninety seconds. It is a horror picture that loves horror, mocks horror, and grieves for it, all at once, and it was made by a first-time director who understood the genre better than most people who had been working in it for decades.