Thunder Alley

Thunder Alley finds Fabian banned from NASCAR tracks after causing the death of another driver. Stanley Adams might want to put him on his team of racers, but the other drivers aren't for having him around.

Desperate for employment Fabian hooks up with an auto stunt show owner Jan Murray who's paying him peanuts and trying to capitalize on Fabian's bad rep. He's got to take it, but Annette Funicello who's Murray's daughter provides another reason to stick around.

The rest of the film is Fabian's struggle to get back to the NASCAR circuit while at the same time juggling both Annette and his current girl friend Diane McBain. Personally, I would have taken McBain, she has it all over Annette.

Thunder Alley is helped by location shooting at the southern NASCAR tracks and good film footage of NASCAR racing. Not helped by a rather silly story which delves into the real reason for Fabian's problems and his rather unrealistic recovery from same.

Still fans of NASCAR might go for this.

Annette tried to break away from her beach party films in this Drive- In flick! A good performance by Diane McBain and some good racing scenes help to make this period piece fun to watch! The dancing is also "COOL"! Annettes song ""Whats A Girl To Do?" is the real show stopper! Catch this on cable!

THUNDER ALLEY is a 1967 stock car racing drama set in the south and starring onetime teen idols Fabian and Annette Funicello along with Warren Berlinger and Diane McBain. What struck me as I watched it is how similar it is to an Elvis Presley movie. In fact, two of the cast, Berlinger and McBain, had appeared with Elvis a year earlier in SPINOUT, which also had a racing theme. If you put Deborah Walley (also from SPINOUT) in Annette's role of stunt driver (a role better suited to the spunkier Walley anyway) and put Elvis in Fabian's role and gave the character a few songs, you would have had a near perfect Elvis vehicle. And if they'd allowed THUNDER ALLEY's Richard Rush to direct it (instead of one of the old studio workhorses like Norman Taurog who pounded out nine Elvis vehicles in the 1960s) and kept the edge to it, including a hot bedroom scene Fabian has with a very sexy Diane McBain, it might possibly have taken Elvis in a new direction away from all the SPEEDWAY, TICKLE ME and DOUBLE TROUBLE-type films he was doing at the time. Oh well, we can dream, can't we?

(Not that an Elvis-Annette pairing would have been a bad thing either, mind you.)

Considering this film contains several Nascar real races you may think a priori it is an enterrtaining movie - at least for a car race fan. But no: it is one of the most boring, dull and badly made car race films I have ever watched. Even Elvis' Spinout was much better, more enterrtaining and did include much better songs. Funicello's only song is bad and at any point interest takes off. Car races should had made it but neither they do it: they are announced, prepared and... suddenly they have already began without noticing; then a few boring laps and...suddenly race is over (you only notice it because you hear Race is over!) without any emotion, no thrilling no nothing. All an all a really boring film not only because of the performances but mainly because of the terrible edition: did best cuts end on the montage room floor? We will never know but I am afraid they did not.

What impresses me about this picture is just how slick it is. The auto racing genre is a tough, gritty one. And American International Pictures was a small, scuffling outfit. Yet "Thunder Alley" looks slick. It isn't quite up to major studio production standards, but "Alley" give the impression of being machine tooled junk. Well, not exactly junk. It's a machine-tooled, formulaic genre exercise, with most of the grit and idiosyncrasy removed. Arkoff, Nicholson, Topper, and Rush apparently had this genre down to a science, so here they are content to present a "safe" genre exercise and leave it at that. Annette Funicello is good. (She really was an underrated actress, and it's a shame she didn't have a longer and more active career.) A Funicello-Avalon pairing would have been more fun, but Fabian Forte is effective as the male lead. (He had genuine talent as an actor, perhaps more talent than he had as a singer.) Monroe Askins' cinematography is professional, yet, as indicated earlier, not quite up to major studio standards. (This actually works in the film's favor, since the photography gives it a bit of the grit that it so sorely needs.) And Daniel Haller's art direction does give the film a bit of flare. All in all, "Alley" is an entertaining action flick. But if you're looking for grit, you'll have to settle for slickness instead.