Pam Grier!

SHEBA BABY-1975-Beleaguered former cop now a P.I. Sheba Shayne (Pam Grier) leaves Chicago for Louisville, Kentucky to help her father (Rudy Challenger) and his partner Brick (Austin Stoker) who's loan business is being threatened by gangsters (“Do they have a fight on their hands”). After barely surviving a car explosion, Sheba forces info from an informant by pushing his face into a bucket of chlorine. After getting a lecture from Brick about taking the law into her own hands they have sex. The whole thing seems to be run by Pilot (D'Urville Martin) and the duo bust up a meeting but he gets away. Later after her dad is killed she gets info at gunpoint from a comic pimp (“How can you look so fine and be mean to me?”) in a car wash. After a chase through a carnival it's revealed that Pilot is just a lackey. The real boss is a white guy named Shark (Dick Merrifield) who has a party on a yacht that Sheba infiltrates and winds up having her cover blown after a cat fight. She escapes and eventually fights Shark killing him before he kills her.

 Grier was in BUCKTOWN and FRIDAY FOSTER the same year. Director William Girdler made THE EXORCIST influenced ABBY the same year he worked on SHEBA. Unfortunately after making only 4 more movies he was killed in a helicopter crash while scouting locations in the Philippines. Stoker was also in ABBY and had a voice role in the animated RETURN TO THE PLANET OF THE APES the same year.

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