![[box cover]](../../reviewimgs/f/foxybrown.jpg)
Foxy Brown
Intended to be a sequel to their previous success Coffy, Foxy Brown re-teamed writer-director Jack Hill with Pam Grier, the woman he made a star. The film is a revenge fantasy, much like Coffy, that has Foxy Brown (Grier) getting revenge on the drug dealers who killed her government-agent boyfriend, whom Foxy's brother (Huggy Bear, a.k.a. Antonio Fargas) turned over to get out of debt. Her method — get into the drug dealer's harem and destroy the empire from within, which allows Grier to get naked and kill people (but unfortunately, not at the same time). Entertaining in a low-budget sort of way, Foxy Brown has enough action and humor going for it to make it a lowbrow success. Nonetheless, one of Foxy's rampages lands her in enemy hands where she is beaten and raped — it may fit the template of these kinds of stories, but the sequence also makes the exploitation factor a little too high to make the film a successful date movie, even if the bad guys get their just deserts. Grier does get to kill quite a few people (and show off the body that made her a star), but at this point in her career she still wasn't much of an actress — thankfully Hill knows how to make an exploitation film, so the action scenes are pretty good, and the story is more clever than most big-budget Schwarzenegger outings. MGM has given Foxy Brown a moderate DVD transfer for a low-budget movie, but they still aren't doing the work of a better studio (say Warner or Fox) on their catalog titles. Anamorphic widescreen (1.85:1), monaural audio. Includes a commentary with Jack Hill. Trailer, keep-case.
—DSH
