Flower Child Coffin (Pam Grier) is Coffy, who saves lives as an emergency room nurse but also takes them as she gets revenge for her sister Lubelle, murdering the people who got her hooked on heroin. Once her friend Officer Carter (William Elliot) gets crippled by those very same people, she decides to up her need to kill everyone in her way.

She thinks her boyfriend, Howard Brunswick (Booker Bradshaw), is on her side, working to make the community better. But he’s just as bad as her targets, King George (Robert DoQui) and Arturo Vitroni (Alan Arbus). He even tells them that she’s just another whore, sending her to death at the hands of Omar (Sid Haig) before she pulls a weapon out of her hair and stabs him in the throat over and over again.

All that’s left is to, well, kill everyone. Yet Howard almost wins her back. He tells her how they’re going to change the community. And then a white woman asks him to come back to bed. What else can she do but blow his manhood off with a shotgun?

Jack Hill directed and wrote this, and everything he touched — Switchblade Sisters, Spider Baby — became the kind of movies that transcended their drive-in and exploitation beginnings. Coffy isn’t the kind of woman who needs to be rescued; she’s a force of sheer violence, unstoppable even when things look at their worst. By the end, she walks the beachfront alone; you half expect her to walk into the ocean like Godzilla.

You can watch this on Tubi.