“The world doesn’t look any less pretty when skull-bashings and stabbings take place,” the film critic Stanley Kauffmann once wrote of Shohei Imamura’s serial-killer film Vengeance Is Mine. The same could be said of Jack Hill’s Coffy, and it has everything to do with Pam Grier, who plays the title heroine.

Mary tells an interviewer, amid well-timed pauses and mild whimpers, “I just try to think beautiful thoughts, so that the beauty will come out in what I write.” She, herself, is equipped with an abundance of beauty. She even has her own isomorphic companion of sorts—a hot Latino butler named Garcia, clad in cheap satin open-faced shirts.