(Credits: Far Out / YouTube Still)
Mon 26 January 2026 19:15, UK
Few filmmakers in modern cinema know how to kick off a movie better than Quentin Tarantino, and while a grandstanding introduction isn’t a requisite for success, his work would feel weird without it.
From the iconic opening diner exchange of Reservoir Dogs to Christoph Waltz’s spine-chilling monologue in Inglourious Basterds, via Jackie Brown‘s title sequence being soundtracked to ‘Across 110th Street’ and even the convenience store shootout that ignites From Dusk till Dawn, he knows how to write a ripper.
Explosive opening scenes have become increasingly commonplace in Hollywood, which has a lot to do with studio executives insisting that it’s better to hook an audience from the opening frames, instead of easing them in gently, and much of that blame should be laid at the feet of streaming and mobile phones for doing irreparable damage to attention spans.
Some directors prefer to set the stage, while Tarantino is just one of many who like to start off on the front foot. It’s been a hallmark of his work dating back to his debut feature, and since he’s the industry’s most famous magpie who can’t help but pick up the shiny things he admires and use them again, he may have gleaned that inspiration from one of the many movies he was obsessed with in his youth.
The future two-time Academy Award winner was raised on B-movies and blaxploitation, and he would have been ten years old when Jack Hill’s Coffy was released in May 1973. It doesn’t matter if he saw a first-run screening or not; minds were figuratively and literally blown by the time the narrative kicked into high gear.
The story begins with Grier’s title character, or Flower Child Coffin, for her Sunday name, convincing a drug dealer to lure her back to his home. Posing as a heroin-addicted junkie, the unwitting criminal obliges her request, only for her true motives to be revealed when she unleashes the immortal line, “This is the end of your life, you motherfucking dope pusher!” before removing said drug dealer of his head with a shotgun.
Unbeknownst to him, Coffy is exacting a revenge plot against the people she holds responsible for her younger sister’s heroin addiction, not to mention the prostitution, corruption, and dirty deeds being committed on a daily basis by the people in power that she’s moonlighting as a vigilante to take down.
“The film that knocked my socks off the most was Coffy,” Tarantino said in What It Is… What It Was! The Black Film Explosion of the ’70s in Words and Pictures. “From the moment she shot the guy in the head with a sawed-off shotgun, and his head exploded like a watermelon. I had never seen that before, and it just got better from there.”
That happens in the first few minutes, and he was hooked. He remained hooked for the remainder of Coffy‘s running time, too, but he’ll never forget his first time seeing Grier forcibly separating a man’s head from his shoulders and reducing it to a pile of gelatinous goo.
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