A group of schoolgirls are going through the city at night. A group of doughy, presumably drunk douchebags are sitting outside a bar. When the girls pass, they chase them down, corner them in a warehouse, and gangrape them. As the girls dress themselves in the wake of this horrific act, displaying about as much concern in doing so as they did when they were being assaulted (i.e. surprisingly little), they swear an oath to fight back against rapists everywhere. After some training in the arts of kung fu and guns, they go out on the streets to kick people in the dick and/or tear their genitals off. Thus our series of random events begins. They get revenge on their rapists, and break up a group of white guys conspiring to keep minorities out of their neighborhoods. Then, they recruit a sixth member in the form of a new student at their school by seeing how well she fights when someone is trying to pull her panties off in the shower. We find out that the dean of the school, plus the couple one of the Alley Cats babysits for, are all rapists, and they'll get the babysitting girl thrown out of school if she exposes them. But all's well that ends well, as the Cats eventually go after the rapist couple and administer to them a fatal dose of aphrodisiacs. How does one die from aphrodisiacs, exactly? Well...how do you think?
The Black Alley Cats is simultaneously alarming, hilarious, tasteless, and progressive. It is a movie which has beguiled me for years now due to the fact I keep watching it, even though it deals with something I actually have a hard time processing. I have to be real careful not to set off my PTSD when it comes to movie with sexual assault in them, but this was one of the movies I stumbled across before I picked up my trigger, so I know what to expect well enough to keep myself safe. The opening rape scene is distressing, but at the same time, the dudes keep their pants on, and the actresses, while generally good throughout the movie, are pretty wooden when it comes to delivering the concept of traumatizing horror. The stuff later in the movie, involving the couple Pam works for, is decidedly grosser, but the ending to everything helps redeem it. Nothing helps a movie like watching two people uncontrollably fuck while two cops try to make them stop.
It's sort of like a weird R-rated cartoon, really, in terms of both situation and consequence. This is another rape-revenge movie I've seen where no one ends up pregnant or with an STD--which, thank God, because there wouldn't be a chance in hell of that movie being entertaining afterward (least to me). What's more, however, there is relatively little notation of trauma, per se, at least as far as the girls who aren't Pam go. She ends up a little more beaten up because she is attacked several times, but at the end of it all, the girls really tend to laugh a lot of stuff off. At least the movie never frames it in a way that shows they're overly upset--it glorifies things like making a bunch of ladies molest a dude for being at a sleazy business meeting. Another take, I suppose, could show the girls' turn towards vigilantism as a symptom of their troubled minds, but I'm glad we got--as much as we could, at least--an optimistic rape-revenge film. It's a film where if you're assaulted, as too many people are, you can channel that rage and fear and pain and sorrow into improving the world, and yes, taking revenge on your attackers, without getting in trouble. Of course, it's also rather suspect that the police were apparently missing from existence both during and after the rapes at the film's inception, but no screenplay is perfect.
I haven't done a really good job of describing the strangeness of this film, but it involves things like: 1) the fact that the thing with the rapist lesbian headmistress is never resolved; 2) the girls call one of their victims "pink toes"; 3) I wasn't kidding about genital-ripping. At one point in their training montage, their instructor teaches them how to "rip the groin away." It's marvelous.
And yet, accurate. I never took self-defense courses in college but I knew other ladies who did. From them I learned that yes, a lot of self-defense programs for women do involve how to properly and safely injure the tender balls of the male rapist. It makes sense. A lot of people say that if you attack someone's crotch when they're trying to kill/molest you, they'll just get madder and treat you worse, but I can't imagine a man alive who would want to rape or even chase someone after even just one blow to the crotch, especially if that blow is meant to cause some hospital-level damage. I've known people, too, who condemn this level of violence, but again, I apparently have to remind people of when they are defending one of the most atrocious crimes a person can commit. If a rapist gets their balls torn off, or, hell, gets a stiff punch to the ovaries, in the course of trying to rape someone, I don't have pity for them. That's how serious this is.
The Black Alley Cats, however, raises important questions without being overly serious. That sense of frivolity in the face of its subject matter, plus its strangeness and weird cheapo charms, make it worth your while, if this is something you feel you could watch. It's a rough sit, and yet it always seem to hit its final reel before I'm ready for the madness to end. Odd.
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