Alley Cat

Cheapshot little actioner is a swell ride for fans of films about chicks who kick ass. A winsome girlie has a confrontation with a couple of small-time car thieves...she beats the crap out of them, bruising their little egos. They enlist the aid of their scar-faced gang leader in a nasty vengeance plot, but this little lady has more mean-streets machismo than they bargained for! Before long, she's on a karate-chopping revenge rampage of her own. This flick is admittedly pretty small beans, but there's enough sleazy action and jiggly feminine exposures to keep most trash film lovers pleasantly amused.

Production quality...pretty low. Performances...kinda stale. Just overlook the obvious flaws here, and you may find yourself having some mindless fun with ALLEY CAT.

5/10

What a great line! This movie could have been block buster with a little more funding. Great idea with a karate butt kicking actress! Check it out. Worth a gander!

The lead's exceptional karate skills are the reason to see this. That and her shapely, well-worked out body--obviously martial arts training has served her well in more than just strength-building. And she's not the only one. All the meat here is choice, and even the guys, even the bad ones, are good-looking. Otherwise it's a cheapo grrl-power revenge flick. YouTube lists it as "Fighting Karate Lady Alley Cat Film". Says it all.

Doing a little research on this movie, I uncovered evidence that this was a troubled production, with both multiple directors and a temporary shutdown in the middle of shooting. The behind the scenes turmoil ended up on screen. The story is kind of a mess. There are characters that disappear for long periods of time (or disappear with no explanation.) There are scenes that seem to provide no real purpose except maybe to make sure the movie gets to an acceptable running time (though it's only 82 minutes long.) But even if there hadn't been problems behind the scenes, there would still be some big problems with the movie. Karin Mani looks nice, but she simply cannot act very well, and her martial art sequences are not the least bit exciting or well choreographed. In the end, what we have here is a movie that had great trash potential but will not satisfy even the most forgiving B movie fan.

I appreciated that there was a little ambition as far as straightforward revenge 80's exploitation goes; it posits itself as a kick-ass woman vigilante movie (Frank Miller I bet woulf approve, and if it had been set in NYC Is half expect Daredevil to show up), but then it becomes a woman-in-prison movie for 15 minutes. It may not be much, yet what's fascinating is that the lead Karin can't escape being assaulted anywhere. In this world, it's not just men that can be villainous rapists but women too... That is if they're already behind bars. It still seems significant in some way, whether the filmmakers understood it or not, that there's another level of commentary with just those scenes. Bottom line, there is no shelter in this Hollywood.

I also liked this lead, albeit the amount of nudity makes it so that I might question if anyone ever tries to pull this out as some hidden-cum-underrated feminist treasure. It's a movie made for men AND women, it's not exclusionary really, and she certainly has a gigantic load of her own agency. On the other hand, frankly, if I were to show this to, say, my father in law (a B movie diehard for decades), he'd probably find a couple other reasons to dig this. That said, she does the role well and did the work necessary for it (I imagine she was a sruntwpman either before or after this too).

Anyway, good exploity times! PS: I advise my many female friends on social media who I've seen over time complain about men who pull the kind of crap the men do visavi hitting on others... Learn all the martial arts.