There is more going on here then in your typical slasher. Released under various titles, 'Communion', 'Holy Terror', and most famously 'Alice, Sweet Alice', it has been said this is a movie only an angry ex Catholic could make.
A passion project of its co-writer and director Alfred Sole (1943-2022), the film was made early in his career, and though it shows great promise Sole did not go on to do much more directing. David would do some director for hire work but would spend much of his Hollywood career in production design and there mostly in television, he is the credited production designer on nearly every episode of 'Veronica Mars' and 'Castle'.
The production design on 'Alice' is rather strong, espically on its independtly financed budget of $350,000. Sole was a trained architect and working in the field of building restoration as he started the film, as a result he got some great locations inside and around older buildings in various states of repair. Filmed and set in his decaying home town of Patterson, New Jersey, I was about 20 minutes in before it dawned on me that this was a period piece. The film is set in 1961 and that presumably so it could depict the pre Vatican Two Catholicism in which the director was raised.
A 10 year old Brooke Shields in her screen debut plays Karen Spages, the advertising of later releasses emphasized her presence but she's not in it that much, her character is murdered, strangled and then set aflame moments before her first communion. Suspicison naturally falls on her older sister Alice (Paula Sheppard), who was not in the chapel where she was supposed to be at the time of the murder, is a somewhat cruel child and is seen to be jelouse of her favored younger sibling.
Alice is known to act out, she is copping, or trying to with the absence of her father. Though the backstory is never spelled out in great detail "Dom" Spages (Niles McMaster), left the family and church in the recent past and remarried. The mother (Linda Miller, daughter of television Legend Jackie Gleason) remains defiantly Catholic. Alice is surrounded mostly by Catholics and they are mostly unsympathetic to her, difficult child as she is. Even Father Tom (Rudolph Willrich), the most likable and benign Catholic presence in the movie clearly favored Karen to Alice.
The film deals with the drama of an already shattered family trying to cope amid tragedy. "Dom" comes back for his daughter's funneral, trys to comfort his surviving daughter and also solve the mystery of the killers identity. There are further attacks, stabbings, Alice remains under suspecision and is remanded to the custody of mental health professionals who like seemingly everyone else in her life fail her. Director Sole said he wanted Alice to be depicted as a troublesd girl, an adolcent (She's supposed to be around 12 but the actress who plays her was 19, though dosen't look it at all) on the brink, who could seemingly go either way in life.
Minor spoilers
Alice turns out to not be the real killer, that person turns out to be a character we know from other contexts and this persons motivations are perversely religious. Unreleted to all this we also have a pedophile residing in Alice's building, he makes some trouble and is played by the obese and slimy Alphonso DeNoble, who was working as a bouncer in a gay night club at the time this movie was made. DeNoble would go on to have a short film career in a couple of other horror movies before dying in his early thirties. Lillian Roth, a notorious actress in her own right, also has a small role as a police pathologist.
'Alice, Sweet Alice' is a moody, horror- thriller-family-drama, a strange hybrid of a film whose distinctive look, amateur detective verses killer story line, as well as themes of religion, decay and hidden truths have caused it to be referred to as an American 'Giallo film'. It's a diamond in the rough piece of cinema, which hints at a potential autor filmmaker whose career sadly never realized. ***
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