Pam Grier

Jackie Brown (Two-Disc Collector's Edition)

The curiosity of Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown is Robert Forster's worldly wise bail bondsman Max Cherry, the most alive character in this adaptation of Elmore Leonard's Rum Punch. The Academy Awards saw it the same way, giving Forster the film's only nomination. The film is more "rum" than "punch" and will certainly disappoint those who are looking for Tarantino's trademark style. This movie is a slow, decaffeinated story of six characters glued to a half million dollars brought illegally into the country. The money belongs to Ordell (Samuel L. Jackson), a gunrunner just bright enough to control his universe and do his own dirty work. His just-paroled friend--a loose term with Ordell--Louis (Robert De Niro) is just taking up space and could be interested in the money. However, his loyalties are in question between his old partner and Ordell's doped-up girl (Bridget Fonda). Certainly Fed Ray Nicolette (Michael Keaton) wants to arrest Ordell with the illegal money. The key is the title character, a late-40s-ish flight attendant (Pam Grier) who can pull her own weight and soon has both sides believing she's working for them. The end result is rarely in doubt, and what is left is two hours of Tarantino's expert dialogue as he moves his characters around town.

Tarantino changed the race of Jackie and Ordell, a move that means little except that it allows Tarantino to heap on black culture and language, something he has a gift and passion for. He said this film is for an older audience although the language and drug use may put them off. The film is not a salute to Grier's blaxploitation films beyond the musical score. Unexpectedly the most fascinating scenes are between Grier and Forster: two neo-stars glowing in the limelight of their first major Hollywood film after decades of work. --Doug Thomas

Quentin Tarantino presents the premiere of the JACKIE BROWN COLLECTOR'S SERIES DVD, complete with your favorite award-winning movie, all-star cast, and never-before-seen footage. What do a sexy stewardess (Pam Grier), a street-tough gun runner (Samuel L. Jackson), a lonely bail bondsman (Academy Award®-nominee Robert Forster), a shifty ex-con (Robert DeNiro), an earnest federal agent (Michael Keaton), and a stoned-out beach bunny (Bridget Fonda) have in common? They're six players on the trail of a half million dollars in cash! The only questions are ... who's getting played ... and who's gonna make the big score! Combining an explosive mix of intense action and edgy humor, Tarantino scores again with the entertaining JACKIE BROWN!

Escape From L.A.

Kurt Russell reprises his role as Snake Plissken, of the near-future thriller Escape from New York, in this reworking of that film's basic premise. Instead of New York being a maximum-security prison, this time it's L.A., which through the agency of earthquakes has become an island of the damned. This penal colony is where the film's future rulers, something very like the Moral Majority, send those deemed guilty of "moral crimes." But something has gone wrong in this new moral order, because the President's daughter has absconded to L.A. with a detonation device, and Snake is commandeered to retrieve it. The film's dark dystopia, with its satrical elements taking aim at our dwindling freedoms, and the eclipsing of democracy by narrow interests, are more the subject this time. As a result the action suffers, and the plot devices are sometimes weak and predictable. But just below the surface there is a coiled Snake ready to strike. Steve Buscemi's performance as a weasely hawker of L.A. tour maps is a standout, and the presence of Peter Fonda and Pam Grier adds to the fun. In fact, just the sight of Fonda surfing down the flooded corridor of Sunset Boulevard is reason enough to check this movie out. --Jim Gay

Ghosts of Mars (Special Edition)

Ghosts of Mars may not be one of John Carpenter's finer efforts, but you can't knock the veteran director for staying true to his roots--it's clearly a Carpenter film, reveling in its B-movie blood lust, and fueled by the director's rock & roll rebellion as well as the sex appeal of star Natasha Henstridge. This rickety sci-fi/horror hybrid recalls Carpenter's Assault on Precinct 13, with various connections from throughout the director's career--for better and worse. It's the year 2176, and human colonists on Mars are controlled by a political "matronage," with women (for reasons unexplained) holding court in the capitol city of Chryse. Mars Police Force Lt. Ballard (Henstridge) has been sent to retrieve James "Desolation" Williams (Ice Cube), the planet's most notorious criminal, from a remote mining-colony prison. With her ill-fated crew, Ballard discovers that the colonists have nearly all been possessed by ancient Martian spirits bent on reclaiming the planet, turning them into an army of self-mutilating freaks suggesting an unholy union of Marilyn Manson and the sadomasochistic Cenobites from the Hellraiser films. None of this makes much sense, and the shaky alliance between cops and criminals is a predictable excuse for rampant battle scenes between surviving humans and the ghost-possessed maniacs. Exotic weaponry abounds (along with cheap special effects and some laughable dialogue), resulting in the gruesome dispatch of expendable costars Pam Grier, Joanna Cassidy, Robert Carradine, and Clea Duvall. Driven by Carpenter's synth-metal score, this violent free-for-all has a few brief highlights, but it's suspenseless and ultimately absurd. It's not much, but for loyal fans it's probably enough. --Jeff Shannon

Above the Law

Steven Seagal plays a Chicago cop who takes on CIA types in this action thriller from Andrew Davis (The Fugitive). Davis brings muscle to the project, including some strong set pieces that make Seagal (who also co-wrote and co-produced the film) look awfully good. Costars Pam Grier and Sharon Stone give a big assist in that department, too, yet nothing can really mitigate such ridiculous moments as Seagal's getting profound with a villain in his raspy monotone: "You think you're above the law. But you're not." The DVD release includes full-screen and widescreen presentations, production notes, trailers, optional Spanish soundtrack and optional French and Spanish subtitles. --Tom Keogh

Coffy

In the opening minutes of Coffy, Pam Grier's star-making role, she blasts the skull of a sleazy drug pusher into pulp like a watermelon and shoots his junkie assistant with an overdose of heroin. Jack Hill knows how to open a movie, and he never lets up on the down-and-dirty action. Coffy is an emergency room nurse by day and vigilante by night, targeting the dealers who made her sister a comatose junkie. She works her way up to the Italian mobsters muscling into the ghetto drug trade while she's romanced by glib, smooth-talking politician Booker Bradshaw and wooed by nice-guy cop William Elliot, whose refusal to sell out to the corrupt force earns him a crippling beating.

There's plenty of sex, a catty girl-fight that leaves the losers topless, and car chases and shootouts galore, but what makes Coffy a blaxploitation classic is Grier's Amazonian presence and fiery charisma, and the gritty, low-budget action scenes marked by visceral, wincing violence. Mob strong-arm Sid Haig (Spider Baby) cackles while dragging his victim (a strutting peacock pimp played by Nashville's Robert DoQui) behind a speeding car in a sadistic lynching, and Grier runs down one bad guy with a speeding car and takes care of another with a shotgun to the groin. Hill had previously directed Grier in The Big Doll House and The Big Bird Cage. Their next and last picture together, Foxy Brown, was originally written as the sequel to Coffy. --Sean Axmaker

She's the ultimate tough and sexy heroine. She's Soul Cinema superstar Pam Grier, and whether delivering her justice with a shotgun, a razor or just her bare hands, she doesn't miss a beat in this "smashing, no-holds-barred tale of retaliation" (Variety)! Nobody ever commandeered the screen quite like Pam Grier...and Coffy "couldn't be better! [It's] one of the most entertaining movies ever made"(Quentin Tarantino)! Grier is Coffy, nurse by day and avenging angel by night. When she discovers that her little sister has been doped upand freaked outby a greedy drug pusher, she not only puts an end to his miserable days, but she vows to follow his trail of corruption up to the topthe very top. But what Coffy doesn't realize is that all is not as it seemsand that the leafy green behind the pushers' scene just may come from someone she knows!

Beyond the Valley of the Dolls

One never tires of watching Russ Meyer's Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, a distant relative of Jaqueline Susann's bestselling novel, Valley of the Dolls, and its filmic counterpart, Valley of the Dolls. Kelly McNamara (Dolly Read), Casey Anderson (Cynthia Myers), and Petronella Danforth (Marcia McBroome), star as the hot female trio who clumsily navigate Hollywood during the Swingin' Sixties to promote their band, The Carrie Nations. Written by Rogert Ebert, Ebert calls the film the "first rock-horror exploitation musical," because BVD, as it's called by fans, encompasses all that was sexy, funny, hip, schlocky, stylish, and horrific about America's most interesting cultural period. BVD can be viewed as a Sixties' artifact, packed with consummate party scenes (and a cameo appearance by Strawberry Alarm Clock), as the original skin flick, as a proto-cult classic, or as a benchmark in American cinema, since it is actually well- written, artfully shot, and finely edited. This special edition re-release includes a second disc comprised of five featurettes, whose topics include Meyers' biography, the Carrie Nations music as soundtrack, Casey and Roxanne's titillating lesbian love scene, and the political climate during the Sixties. Revisiting Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, especially after Russ Meyer's recent death, reminds viewers to treasure his visionary obsession with female beauty. --Trinie Dalton

When three female rock'n'rollers travel to Hollywood to claim an inheritance, they meet up with a kinky music promoter who turns them on to a whole new scene. At first, all seems very exciting and the naïve trio becomes submerged in his dangerous tinseltown underworld-before they discover his true motives.

The Package

Gene Hackman is a career officer assigned a routine mission well beneath him: deliver a prisoner (Tommy Lee Jones) from Europe to the United States. However, the simple assignment becomes a daring cat-and-mouse game played as the last flames of the Cold War are flickering. This is the first of three films that teamed Jones with director Andrew Davis. In 1989 Jones was a wild card: an actor respected but only popping up in grade B fare. After Davis's Under Siege and The Fugitive, Jones was America's favorite gruff character actor, with an Oscar on his mantel. With a weaker script, Davis still creates the same kind of magic here. Hackman is superb as the officer, an action role similar to others that the nearly 60-year-old unexpectedly excelled at (Bat 21, Narrow Margin) during this period. Tight, tense, and with no letup in the third act, The Package is a good gem for a Saturday night flick. --Doug Thomas

From the director of The Fugitive comes a brilliant, explosively entertaining action/thriller featuring powerful performances by OscarÂ(r) winners* Gene Hackman (Unforgiven) andTommy Lee Jones (Men in Black). Featuring a superb supporting cast that includes Dennis Franz ( N.Y.P.D. Blue ), Pam Grier (Jackie Brown) and John Heard (The Pelican Brief), this'top-notch thriller (The Associated Press) really delivers! Sergeant Johnny Gallagher (Hackman) thinks he's been given a routine assignment: to escort a rebellious American soldier (Jones) from Europe to the U.S. for a military court martial. Gallagher soon learns, however, that the assignment is anything but routine, when he uncovers a terrifying military conspiracy. The clock is ticking down to a historic superpower summit, and Gallagher must stop the deadly plot before it's too late...for him and his country. *Gene Hackman: Actor, The French Connection (1971); Supporting Actor, Unforgiven (1992); Tommy Lee Jones: Supporting Actor, The Fugitive (1993)

In Too Deep

Undercover cop Jeffrey Cole is doing "God's" work, and he is losing his religion. God is Dwayne Gittens, whose neighborhood benevolence masks his thriving Cincinnati (a refreshing change of scenery) drug trade. Cole, a rookie fresh out of the Academy is "ready for the big score" and is charged by his mentor to "bring God and his angels down for good." But the higher Cole rises in Gittens's organization, the deeper he gets. Omar Epps redeems himself after The Mod Squad with a gripping and empathetic performance as the increasingly conflicted Cole. After scoring as the comic relief in Deep Blue Sea, LL Cool J gets down to business as Gittens, the master of his domain who rules with an iron hand (and, in one particularly nasty sequence, a pool cue), but is also capable of compassion and charity. As Cole's concerned superior, Stanley Tucci avoids the bluster usually associated with this stock character. Pam Grier, whose career should have gotten a Viagralike pop from Jackie Brown, makes the most out of her thankless role as a fellow officer who finds herself in a climactic standoff with Cole. In Too Deep briefly loses its focus after Cole is pulled from the case. He takes photography classes and becomes involved with a model (Nia Long). But fans of TV's late, lamented Wiseguy, the unjustly neglected Deep Cover, and Donnie Brasco will find Cole'a anguished odyssey compelling. --Donald Liebenson

Hip-hop legend LL Cool J (DEEP BLUE SEA, HALLOWEEN: H2O) is teamed with hot stars Omar Epps (THE WOOD, SCREAM 2) and Nia Long (BOILER ROOM, BIG MOMMA's HOUSE) in a gritty crime drama about a dedicated young cop who goes deep undercover to take down a ruthless gangster! Officer Jeff Cole (Epps) is given a dangerous mission: infiltrate the syndicate of "God" (LL Cool J), the charismatic and deadly crime lord who rules the city's streets! But as Cole sinks deeper and deeper into God's crew, he begins to get in over his head ... until the line that separates his true identity from his street persona begins to disappear! Also featuring Stanley Tucci (SHALL WE DANCE? THE TERMINAL) and Pam Grier (JACKIE BROWN), this action-packed story unfolds with a power you'll find intensely entertaining!

Foxy Brown

Pam Grier, the voluptuous queen of blaxploitation movies (and the foxy title character of Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown) reigns supreme in this kick-ass action flick. Bodacious nurse Foxy takes the law into her own hands after her main squeeze is murdered in cold blood. The standard revenge plot of Foxy Brown moves along on fast-forward, and the violence ratio (some of it quite gruesome) is high. Director Jack Hill, a master of the low-budget drive-in movie (Switchblade Sisters), made Coffy with Pam Grier the year before. This one's not quite as much fun, but it is decidedly kinkier, and the parade of 1970s fashion crimes is mind expanding. At one crucial moment Foxy saves herself by pulling a concealed revolver out of her mighty Afro--absolutely one of the high points of blaxploitation cinema. --Robert Horton

She's brown sugar and spice...and if you don't watch it, she'll put you on ice! Delivering a performance worthy of "the Queen of the genre" (Los Angeles Times), Grier portrays one of the screens first action heroines with humor, sensitivity and steely determination. This electrifying revenge thriller explodes with all the sex appeal and cooler-than-cool attitude of its irresistible leading lady. Foxy Brown (Grier) has found her soulmate in an undercover narcotics investigator, but when he is brutally murdered, she swears vengeance against the crime ring responsible. Posing asa call girl to gain access to the ring's inner circle, Foxy discovers just how high the corruption extends, igniting a blistering war that takes her from the city streets to a remote drug laboratory to a breathtaking midair battle behind the controls of an airplane! But the most startling confrontations are yet to come as she schemes to bring down her boyfriend's killers in ways they never could have imagined.

Black Mama, White Mama

Pam Grier in a women-in-prison movie? Why did no one think of this sooner? OK, they did. Several times. But this one is different. Black Mama, White Mama is a bizarre update of The Defiant Ones with a little Cool Hand Luke and Chained Heat thrown in for good measure. Grier stars as Lee Daniels, a pimp-and-drug-lord's moll who's looking for a way to escape both prison and her thug boyfriend. The dynamic Margaret Markov ably backs her as rich-girl-turned-revolutionary Karen Brent. The two meet in the friendliest Third World prison ever (Tickling games in the shower! What girlish fun!), and before you can say catfight they're chained together at the wrist. A quick prison break later, our feisty ladies are being chased all over the undefined tropical island by the police, revolutionaries, and dueling pimps. Director Jonathan Demme shares the story credit for this one, and his craftsmanship shows--Black Mama, White Mama hits every mandatory facet of the genre, including butt kicking, gunfire, an Evil Lesbian Prison Guard, gratuitously scanty clothing, and dressing up as nuns. Absolutely not to be missed. --Ali Davis

"A genre all by herself" (Voice), Pam Grier tacklesand shacklesher sleekest role yet as the feistier half of a pair of women in chains and on the run in this "colorful, outrageous and truly exciting" action flick (The Hollywood Reporter)! Grier is Lee Daniels, a prostitute doing hard time in an island prison camp for women where the guards have a new way to punish inmates who fight: by cuffing 'em together! Chained to her bitter rival, white revolutionary Karen (Margaret Markov), Lee finds herself literally linked to the revolutionary causeand on the flywhenKaren's guerrilla friends stage a coup! But this foxy inmate's got a cause of her own in the form of a secret stash of cold, hard cash and a getaway boat! Brawling with her white counterpart over which way to go, and tracked like a dog by guards, guerrillas and a gangster after the loot, she's gotta make her escapebefore both mamas' enemies bring them down for good!