Fresh and Exciting

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Watching it is like watching the spectacle of a class clown at their best: you laugh at their jokes, instigate their defiance, and "ooooh" when they get in trouble.

It's simply great fun, a winsome film and an occasionally over-the-top luxury fantasy that never flags.

Exploitation king Jack Hill made FOXY BROWN as a follow-up to COFFY, another blaxploitation epic starring Pam Grier. FOXY BROWN starts off on a slow, rather uneven keel, and I wasn't too sure what I was making of it. The acting is adequate rather than entrancing and the occasional threadbare parts of the storyline are pretty difficult to miss.Sure, the story is enlivened with a funky soundtrack, bizarre supporting characters, and the odd burst of violence, but overall it feels very predictable. And then things change around the halfway mark. Pam Grier kicks into high gear playing a female avenger, out to take vengeance on the various hoods, thieves, murderers, and rapists who stand in her way, and the film becomes a fantastic slice of exploitation entertainment.What follows is an odyssey of ultra-violence featuring some fantastic and gratuitously gory effects sequences. The bit with the plane is my favourite, but there are customary immolations and castrations and it's all played out in a matter-of-fact way by the great Hill. Grier is obviously in her element here and there are fun supporting parts for Antonio Fargas (sleazy), Kathryn Loder (kooky), and Sid Haig (funny). As FOXY BROWN comes to an end, you realise you've been having a great time - at least, after that slow start.

When her undercover cop boyfriend is murdered, bombshell Foxy Brown (Pam Grier) is out for revenge. She goes undercover as a call girl for a sleazy couple (Peter Brown, Kathryn Loder) that runs a prostitution and drug syndicate. Voluptuous and tough Pam Grier is the whole show, kicking ass and looking good doing it. Antonio Fargas plays her weaselly brother. Sid Haig has a small part as a horny pilot. The fight in the lesbian bar and the airplane murder are highlights. Foxy's final moment of revenge left me speechless. Cool theme song, nice nudity, and lots of violence like most of the great blaxploitation movies. Contains some pretty rough scenes and racist language so be prepared for that if you're squeamish. Not quite as good as Coffy but still entertaining.

While arguably Pam Grier's best known work from the period when she owned the Blaxploitation genre, Foxy Brown is unfortunately the least satisfying offering from that chapter of her filmography. While Grier is always delightful to watch, this rather silly outing doesn't offer enough action or originality to distract the viewer from how ultimately stupid the premise is.None of the plot turns that propel the story forward are the least bit feasible, and while I'm certainly aware that films like this aren't meant to be taken seriously, seeing how well Coffy balanced the camp elements with a gritty urban realism makes this follow-up seem disappointing and disjointed.The general plot concerns the murder of Grier's government informant boyfriend, who has been given facial reconstructive surgery to protect his identity from the underworld figures he infiltrated. Apparently, the surgery wasn't all that radical, because despite the sincerity with which Grier and boyfriend's fellow Feds marvel at his unveiling, Grier's sleazy drug addict brother is able to recognize him upon seeing him in his new guise for approximately 10 seconds.Her brother, of course, drops the dime to our resident drug carteles, who are looking for revenge against the man who irked them, although it's not entirely clear why they want him dead. Obviously, the members of this underworld family are not in prison, and are still free to orchestrate their dope trade unhindered, so one has to wonder exactly how this former agent wronged them so significantly that they're willing to risk a broad daylight hit against him. Anyway, he apparently did, so they shoot him down in front of Grier's house. It's worth noting that the two assassins ALSO are able to ascertain his identity after seeing his new face for 10 seconds... This is apparently the most piddling facial reconstruction in the history of film, and one can't help but think that he might have been safer if they skipped the plastic procedure and threw a pair of Groucho glasses on him instead.Grier is, of course, devastated, and immediately sets a revenge plan in action. Once she finds the parties responsible, she does what any rational person would do: poses as a hooker to get inside their organization. Surely, there must be an easier way to get close enough to them to hatch an egg of vengeance (especially since her "audition" for the call girl position allows her to walk right into the midst of their home-base and stand face to face and alone in the room with the woman who ordered her lover's death).But we wouldn't have much of a movie if Foxy's plan was that simple, so we follow her on a call-job, where she befriends a fellow working gal who is content to continue hooking even though she has a husband and child, who storm their way onto the cartel's compound to confront her as she and Foxy leave for their assignment. (Security at the estate that serves as base of operations for both a call-girl ring and a lucrative drug pushing syndicate must not be a high priority, since this random guy can just walk onto the grounds carrying a small child). This subplot is rather meaningless, and the hooker she befriends eventually disappears from the film without any explanation, but the whole point of this detour seems to be for the cartel to find out Foxy is playing spy so that they can send her to a pair of their henchmen to be raped, tortured, and force-fed heroin.Now armed with even more incentive for revenge, Foxy escapes, enlists the help of a local vigilante crew, seduces Sid Haig, and eventually has her bloody vengeance, producing a few memorable bits along the way, luckily for us. One of these involves a thug meeting an airplane propeller head-on to delicious effect, and another finds Foxy castrating the lover of the cartel's chairwoman and delivering his cash and prizes to her in a pickle jar.There are plenty of cheap thrills here to make Foxy Brown a worthy view, but nothing that will encourage repeat viewing the way that Coffy's much more violent, sexy, and solid template does. Having an original title doesn't disguise the fact that this film is, for all intents and purposes, a sequel, thus subject to the familiar rule of diminishing returns. Foxy Brown may not be an Empire Strikes Back, but it definitely isn't a Phantom Menace, so Grier completists won't feel much pain while crossing this one off their list. If that sounds like a meager recommendation, it is, but if you're a fan of Blaxploitation films or Pam Grier, you already know you're going to see this. So why do you care what I think anyway?

After watching this film, I love it, it is an awesome action, chick-flick with sweet soul/funk music. Now I know what you are thinking: when I said "chick-flick," well I meant that chick-flicks aren't just about romance, comedies or films about girlfriends. They are about women, and the love and tragedies they go through; also about the bad-a** women like our Foxy Brown.Well anyway, this film starts with a street hustler named Link Brown, cringing in a bar full of police officers, he's trying to wait out a bunch of thugs who want to beat him for holding out on a loan from losses incurred from street gambling schemes. In desperation he calls his tough sister Foxy to bail him out yet again. Foxy runs some of the thugs into the river in her car. Afterwards, Link pleads to her that he'll live the straight life if he can hide out at her pad for a while. Foxy reluctantly agrees.Later, Foxy goes to visit her boyfriend in hospital. He name is Dalton Ford, an undercover officer who has been investigating the same crime-ring that Link owed money to. The hoodlums thought they'd killed him, but he really ended up in hospital for plastic surgery to give him a new and safe identity. Emerging as handsome Michael Anderson, he and Foxy hope to start life anew. On the streets, they encounter a black gang who beat and run drug pushers out of town. Foxy introduces Michael to the freeloading Link, and Link acts suspicious. Links leaves Michael and Foxy to themselves, but later looks at some newspaper cuttings and adds two and two together. There is an enormous debt to pay ... and this kind of information could clear that debt. No sooner does Foxy think her life will be smooth, than Michael crashes through her door, breathing his last and shot to death. With some detective work, the grieving and raging Foxy soon tracks Link down at his white girlfriend's, and as they snort coke she storms in on them. Livid with anger, Foxy won't kill her own brother, but she does force the identity of Michael's killers out of him, then force him to leave the city. And so Foxy is out for vengeance.So that is all I am tellin' you folks, you will have to see the film for yourself, and see how it ends. I also recommend it for fans of soul/funk music (the music and songs by Willie Hutch), seventies cinema or blaxploitation cinema. Of course I would say "Soul Cinema" because the term "blaxploitation" sounds kind of offensive to me, I mean come on! Barrack Obama is the new President of the US, and he is a black man...what would he and others like him think?