Who is Pam Grier

Comedy and screen legend Richard Pryor hits the comedy road in Moving a good-time tale of a flustered suburbanite trying to relocate with his family from New Jersey to Idaho. Dave Thomas Dana Carvey and Randy Quaid are among the comic ensemble in this movie that packs "a houseful of laughs" (V.A. Musetto New York Post). Next Pryor has a driving ambition in Greased Lightning the decades-spanning true story of Wendell Scott who cracked the all-white world of stock-car racing built cars from junkyard parts endured taunts overcame setbacks and won NASCAR and Grand National crowns. "There's not a more likable movie currently on view" Time reviewer Richard Schickel wrote about this biopic that marks Pryor's first lead film role.

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.

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!

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