Alley Cat (1984) Film Ventures International/Action RT: 84 minutes Rated R (language, violence, rape, full frontal nudity, sexual content, drugs) Director: Victor Ordonez, Edward Victor and Al Valletta Screenplay: Robert E. Waters Music: Quito Colayco Cinematography: Howard A. Anderson III Release date: March 1984 (US) Cast: Karin Mani, Robert Torti, Britt Helfer, Michael Wayne, Jon Greene, Jay Fisher, Rose Dreifus, Claudia Decea, Tim Cutt, Jay Walker, Moriah Shannon, Marla Stone. Box Office: N/A
Rating: ***
Let’s clear up a common misconception about Alley Cat. Despite what the poster art indicates, the heroine is NOT a hooker. She’s just a regular girl with some kind of legitimate job that she never seems to go to. She also has a black belt in karate making her a girl you don’t want to mess with.
That being said, let’s talk about Alley Cat. It’s a crude, violent, low budget, grade-Z exploitation flick about a young woman out for revenge against the scumbags who viciously attacked her grandparents. With its bargain basement production values (it looks like it was made for about $99) and horrendous acting, you’d think that any critic in his or her right mind would write Alley Cat off as worthless garbage that deserves to gather dust on the 99 cent shelves at video stores. Did you forget I’m NOT in my right mind? I like it. It delivers exactly what it promises, action and violence. It’s a total grindhouse flick. It’s exactly the kind of movie you’d see playing on a triple bill at some grimy theater on 42nd Street. Sadly, I didn’t get to see Alley Cat under such ideal circumstances. I watched it at home on video in the safety of my bedroom the first time I saw it (in summer ’94).
The trouble begins when a couple of gang members attempt to steal the tires from a car belonging to Billie Clark (Mani, Avenging Angel) in the middle of the night. She immediately jumps into action and kicks both their asses. They run back to their leader Scarface (Wayne) with the news. He decides to retaliate by stalking and attacking Billie’s grandparents during a late night run to the corner market. The grandmother (Dreifus) dies. The police know who did it, but fail to take action. So Billie does what any pissed-off victim in an exploitation movie would do, she turns vigilante.
While jogging through the park one night, she happens on a young woman being raped by a pair of dirtbags, one of whom tried to steal her tires earlier. She beats them up and holds them at gunpoint until the cops arrive. As is typical in vigilante flicks, the police drag their feet in arresting the real criminals, but waste no time busting Billie for illegally possessing a weapon and firing it in public. Her quest for justice is hampered even further by a judge (Walker) who lets said rapists off with a slap on the wrist but throws her in jail for contempt after a justifiable outburst. Oh, I almost forgot, Billie finds time to strike up a romance with Johnny (Torti, That Thing You Do), the rookie cop investigating the attack on her grandparents.
You can’t rate Alley Cat by the same standards as you would a Hollywood studio film with an actual budget. That wouldn’t be fair. It’s a cheaply-made exploitation movie designed to appeal to loud urban audiences looking to see a bad ass babe beat the hell out of rapists and the creeps that destroyed her family. If taken on those terms, it works. HOWEVER, I’m still obligated to point out its many faults starting with the flawed narrative. After Grandma’s funeral, the grandfather (Fisher) disappears from the movie entirely. We never see him again, we never learn his fate. The fight scenes are poorly choreographed. The lighting is so bad that sometimes it’s too dark to tell what’s going on. It’s badly edited.
There’s not a single convincing performance in the entire cast. They all come off as amateurs. Mani is reasonably attractive, but she looked better in Avenging Angel the following year. I still can’t get over how much Torti resembles Eric Roberts. Too bad he doesn’t have the same level of talent.
The storyline is predictable. But the directors come through where it counts. It’s violent. It also has plenty of female nudity including a drawn-out shower scene in a women’s prison. As you would expect, Billie’s cellmate is a lesbian that comes onto her. Some of the dialogue is hilariously bad like when Billie tells an attempted attacker, “Don’t mess with girls in the park, that’s not nice!”
Alley Cat looks cheap and shabby. It has all the hallmarks of a bad, grade-Z crapfest that no respectable person would be caught dead watching. If you ask me, respectability is overrated. If you dig low budget exploitation revenge actioners, you might want to give Alley Cat a chance.
