Year:  1975
Rating: 4.5

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Like pretty much everyone else I am a fan of Pam Grier, but this Blaxploitation film is a shoddy production and hard to get through. It has a great black cast too - besides Pam it has Carl Weathers, Godfrey Cambridge, Yaphet Kotto, Eartha Kitt, Scatman Crothers, Julius Harris (Live and Let Die) and Paul Benjamin (Across 110th Street). But they were handed a stinker of a script to deal with. At times I felt sorry for both Pam and Yaphet for the dialogue they were forced to say.


Grier is a photographer who happens to be in the wrong place when an assassination attempt on the wealthiest black man in America takes place and has photos. Then one of the killers (Carl Weathers) tries to kill her but is unable to do so after he chases her down the building's hallway in a towel. Later she follows him into an abandoned building in order to . . . I don't know - because when she sees him she runs for her life. There are so many idiotic scenes like this. It turns out to be a conspiracy to kill all the black leaders in America. Led by the only white man in the film who disappears after one scene. I think. It gets confusing.


There is a fair amount of action but not really done well. And one of the strongest traits of many of the Blaxploitation films is a great soundtrack and theme song but this one has a really lame faux soul sound and a godawful theme song. Friday Foster is based on a comic strip character that ran from 1970 - 1974 by Jim Lawrence.


Grier looks great in this film - stunning - especially in her scenes in the shower and in a bath and in bed. This film came shortly after her classics Foxy Brown, Sheba Baby and Coffy which are all so much better than this one - but by 1975 the Blaxploitation genre was losing speed - there had just been so many of them since Shaft in 1971. And this was Grier's last film that would fall into that category. This one is a tired inept mess. Grier deserved better.