{"id":2710,"date":"2024-08-24T13:36:46","date_gmt":"2024-08-24T13:36:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/?p=2710"},"modified":"2024-10-14T11:23:28","modified_gmt":"2024-10-14T15:23:28","slug":"alley-cat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/2024\/08\/24\/alley-cat\/","title":{"rendered":"Alley Cat"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Alley Cat<\/strong> (1984)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Film Ventures International\/Action\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 84 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (language, violence, rape, full frontal nudity, sexual content, drugs)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Victor Ordonez, Edward Victor and Al Valletta\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Robert E. Waters\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Quito Colayco\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Howard A. Anderson III\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: March 1984 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Karin Mani, Robert Torti, Britt Helfer, Michael Wayne, Jon Greene,\u00a0 Jay Fisher, Rose Dreifus, Claudia Decea, Tim Cutt, Jay Walker, Moriah Shannon, Marla Stone.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Box Office: N\/A<\/p>\n

Rating<\/strong>: ***<\/p>\n

\u00a0Let\u2019s clear up a common misconception about Alley Cat<\/strong>. Despite what the poster art indicates, the heroine is NOT a hooker. She\u2019s 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\u2019t want to mess with.<\/p>\n

\u00a0That being said, let\u2019s talk about Alley Cat<\/strong>. It\u2019s 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\u2019d think that any critic in his or her right mind would write Alley Cat<\/strong> off as worthless garbage that deserves to gather dust on the 99 cent shelves at video stores. Did you forget I\u2019m NOT in my right mind? I like it. It delivers exactly what it promises, action and violence. It\u2019s a total grindhouse flick. It\u2019s exactly the kind of movie you\u2019d see playing on a triple bill at some grimy theater on 42nd<\/sup> Street. Sadly, I didn\u2019t get to see Alley Cat<\/strong> 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 \u201994).<\/p>\n

\u00a0The 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0While 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.<\/p>\n

\u00a0You can\u2019t rate Alley Cat<\/strong> by the same standards as you would a Hollywood studio film with an actual budget. That wouldn\u2019t be fair. It\u2019s 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\u2019m still obligated to point out its many faults starting with the flawed narrative. After Grandma\u2019s 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\u2019s too dark to tell what\u2019s going on. It\u2019s badly edited.<\/p>\n

\u00a0There\u2019s 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\u2019t get over how much Torti resembles Eric Roberts. Too bad he doesn\u2019t have the same level of talent.<\/p>\n

\u00a0The storyline is predictable. But the directors come through where it counts. It\u2019s violent. It also has plenty of female nudity including a drawn-out shower scene in a women\u2019s prison. As you would expect, Billie\u2019s cellmate is a lesbian that comes onto her. Some of the dialogue is hilariously bad like when Billie tells an attempted attacker, \u201cDon\u2019t mess with girls in the park, that\u2019s not nice!\u201d<\/p>\n

\u00a0Alley Cat<\/strong> 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<\/strong> a chance.\"\"<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Alley Cat (1984)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Film Ventures International\/Action\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 RT: 84 minutes\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Rated R (language, violence, rape, full frontal nudity, sexual content, drugs)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Director: Victor Ordonez, Edward Victor and Al Valletta\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Screenplay: Robert E. Waters\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Music: Quito Colayco\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cinematography: Howard A. Anderson III\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Release date: March 1984 (US)\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 Cast: Karin Mani, Robert Torti, Britt Helfer, Michael Wayne, Jon […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3662,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2710","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-b-movies"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-content\/uploads\/2024\/08\/Alley-Cat-PIC.jpg?fit=620%2C348&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2710","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2710"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2710\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3663,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2710\/revisions\/3663"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2710"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2710"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/movieguy247.com\/MovieGuy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2710"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}