Entry Twenty-Eight: Alice, Sweet Alice (1976)

Alice, Sweet Alice (AKA Communion, Holy Terror-1976)

Dir: Alfred Sole

"If you survive this night...Nothing will scare you again."

This unsettling psycho killer movie takes a very dim view of Catholicism...Naturally, I loved it!

Angelic Karen (Brooke Shields, The Blue Lagoon) and jealous, detached older sister Alice (Paula Sheppard, Liquid Sky) live with their mother, Catherine (Linda Miller, Elvis and Me) in a boarding house run by grotesque, pedophilic Mr. Alphonso (Alphonso DeNoble, Bloodsucking Freaks).  Also inhabiting the house are Catholic Priest Father Tom (Rudolph Willrich, a guest on nealy every incarnation of Star Trek) and his kindly elderly caretaker, Mrs. Tredoni (Mildred Clinton, Serpico).  When Karen is brutally murdered in church right before her first communion, super-Catholic aunt Annie (Jane Lowry) suspects Alice (she hates Alice because she was conceived out of wedlock).  When Annie is attacked by someone wearing Alice's raincoat and Halloween mask, Alice is taken into custody by the police, but she blames the attack on deceased Karen.  Catherine's ex-husband, Dom (Niles McMaster, also from Bloodsucking Freaks) shows up and tries to play amateur detective to clear his daughter's name, but ends up murdered by the same raincoated figure while Alice is still in custody.  Is the killer really Karen's vengeful spirit, or is there a more worldly explanation?  The answer comes in a double-twist ending and a haunting final shot.

With it's somber, doom-laden atmosphere, diminutive, raincoat wearing killer and out-of-nowhere twist ending, this reminds me a great deal of Nic Roeg's Don't Look Now (praise of the highest order coming from me).  It's also a little reminiscent of early, Hitchcock-channeling DePalma, but done on about 1/8th the budget.  Director Sole has a knack for lighting ordinary human faces in such a way as to make them appear distorted and grotesque and uses canted camera angles and bizarre imagery (A fat man eating a can of cat food, a cat lapping at a pool of blood around a bloated corpse, disgusting close-ups of mouths taking communion) to give the entire film a disorienting, disturbing feel.  It's too bad he really didn't go on to do much else of note (he became a production designer and currently works on the television series Castle).  Shields became a big celebrity after filming this, and it was re-released under two different titles to capitalize and her fame and dupe unsuspecting moviegoers into seeing it again (and if you're that easily fooled, you deserve to be taken for a ride!).  This is a prime example of eerie, weird 70s genre filmmaking and comes HIGHLY recommended.