The Alley Cats (1966)

Directed by Radley Metzger and written by Peter Fernandez, The Alley Cats shows you "the swinging sixties like you've never seen them" according to the DVD cover. Which would be correct if by 1966 people hadn't already seen folk freaking out to crazy tunes and then bedhopping like nymphomaniac rabbits. But isn't that what we've always seen of/associated with the swinging sixties. Those who were around at the time lived it, even if they can't remember most of it, and those who grew up in later years were told and shown just how it was. A mixture of free spirits, free love and freeing fashions.

The Alley Cats gives you all that you would expect as a "time capsule" from this era but it somehow manages to make all of the shenanigans, the sexual encounters and the fluid sexuality incredibly boring. Hard as that may be to believe, this is a dull, dull movie that proves to be about as erotically charged as an episode of Thunderbirds.

Anne Arthur plays Leslie, a young woman who suspects her fiance Logan (Charlie Hickman) of not being entirely faithful to her. Logan, to be fair, isn't being entirely faithful to her as he likes playing around with Leslie's friend, Agnes (Karin Field). Because popular TV shows such as Jerry Springer, The Jeremy Kyle Show, etc weren't around at this time, Leslie decides to solve her problem by "dallying" with Christian (Harald Baerow).  And Irena (Sabrina Koch) isn't looking too unattractive either.

There is nothing I can say about The Alley Cats that really needs to be said. If you see it then you probably won't run screaming from the room, asking for someone to douse your flaming eyeballs. But you probably won't want to ever see it again either. It's just rubbish, quite frankly, but disappointingly bland and inoffensive rubbish. Which, when you think about it, is almost the worst kind of rubbish.

3/10.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Alley-Cats-DVD-US-NTSC/dp/B00000JWWS