Coffy

Jack Hill's 1973 avenger movie Coffy adds credence to the idea that you can reap a thematic windfall by substituting a woman into a typically masculine role. Pam Grier is Coffy, an emergency room nurse driven psychotic by the corruption of her much younger sister. Coffy opens with Grier playacting as a strung out trick, using her whiles to honey trap a local smack peddler. Registering her complaint with a sawn-off, Coffy drifts back to her life, never quite reconnecting with either her job or her politician sugar daddy. A brief dalliance with a childhood sweetheart turned cop arms Coffy with a paper trail of corruption that takes in pimps, the mob and even City Hall. Deciding her best weapon is her looks, Coffy poses as a prostitute, using her sexuality to get close to her intended targets.

Coffy drives the narrative, she's endlessly capable and on-the-fly calculating. Coffy works with a kind of mechanical disconnection for much of the duration, operating under the sincere deduction that men will put themselves in ruinous situations to posses her. She feigns the kind of fragile femininity typified in low-rent action flicks, then confounds that assumed weakness with improvised maximum violence. Naturally, this revenge is framed within the constraints of attention grabbing, cheapy cinema - you're never more than a couple of minutes away from a day player's torn blouse, or a feature disrobing from Grier. The film has its cake, and shotguns it. Hill and Grier play with the idea of belonging and women needing a place. Coffy has a comfortable, aspirational life, but a deeper underlying need for a social justice. This brings her into conflict with all the established facets of her life. The climax sees Coffy reject material comfort and standing to pursue her own desires, wandering off into the night rootless and damaged, but morally uncorrupted.

Mars Attacks!

Based on a series of sci-fi trading cards depicting intergalactic atrocity, Tim Burton's Christmas-coloured apocalypse is the harebrained, vandalised counterpoint to your typical Hollywood alien invasion. Here the human race is a vapid gang of idiots bumbling towards their extinction, lest they offend their Martian visitors. Every effort is made to ingratiate the cosmic tourists who never fail to misunderstand, slaughter the gathered humans, then cackle to themselves. If you really want, Mars Attacks! can be read as a critique of either political leaning. To wit: these 'wimpy' liberals prostrates themselves in the face of something deemed alien while the conservative spectrum is represented by an emotionally sterile WASP, a bellowing military man, and reactionary trailer folk who regard their television set as intergalactic bounty. People, regardless of allegiance, are simply noise in this film.

Mars Attacks! works hard to present a domestic race - almost entirely American at that - who not only seem to be actively pursuing annihilation, but perhaps even deserves it too. The relationship between the two species is broadly that of a comedy double-act. The humans are the straight men, the naive stooge to the jittery Martian jokers. We feed the invaders endless rope with which to hang us; the space-men twitching excitedly at the sheer stupidity of their adversaries. Warner Brothers spent $100 million bringing Burton's Topps card vision to the screen, what did they get? A prank. Mars Attacks! is a riot of sugar-high slaughter completely antithetical to any kind of established blockbuster framework. There's never any sense that the Martians want anything from Earth. There are no asides about plundering resources or any other sort of material currency. Instead, the Martians simply want to destroy everything they see, preferably with the maximum amount of skylarking whimsy. Intergalactic wrong 'uns then, with Tex Avery mindsets, armed with gee-whizz technology. It's impossible not to love these little green men. They just want to have fun.