With his ground-breaking opus, Blood Feast, Herschell Gordon Lewis became fairly well acknowledged as the father of the blood £ guts horror film. The notoriety, however, more often than not overshadows Lewis' brilliant contributions to modern adult cinema.

Here's one of his forgotten pictures— Alley Tramp— a 1966 film that conveys a taboo theme, the nature of which probably wouldn't allow it to be made now, given today's climate and sense of family values.

Alley Tramp stars Annette Courset, who, along with Stacey Walker from Dave Friedman's A Smell of Honey, A Swallow of Brine, contributes one of THE memorable female performances from the sexy Sixties. Courset plays a hot, volatile and curious 16 year-old school girl named Marie who's bursting to explore her own sexuality. One night she chances upon her parents going at it hot and heavy, and this, along with the constant gibing she receives about being a "kid", prompts her to experiment with none other than her 17 year-old cousin, Phillip.

"But we're cousins...," protests Phillip, and before you can slide into a couple of bars of the Patty Duke theme song, he and Marie are off in the bushes coming of age. Along the way, of course, Marie exacts the toll of the wages of sin which is generally expected in a morality playlet. She gets pregnant, has an abortion, goes off the deep end and winds up in a sanitarium.

What makes this film particularly memorable is Courset's combination of tease and defiance. She's quite pretty to begin with and the camera catches her on several occasions stripping out of her school girl outfits in extended voyeuristic scenarios — simple acts in of themselves that become an evocative art form in the hands of a major tease.

The film is pretty explicit for subject matter and its total nudity; and if you relish the idea or mere suggestion of a young coed who's too sexy for her own good, Alley Tramp is one of those hidden classics you'll treasure owning.