BLESS US, FATHER, WE HAVE SINNED........FOR RE-WATCHING "ALICE SWEET ALICE"........

Alice Sweet Alice (aka Communion) (1976)    Amid the 1970's onslaught of slashers, zombies and demon-possessed children, this oddball little movie still stands out among the pack........all by itself.

               ..........cause it's crammed with so many influences, homages and religious iconography, it doesn't resemble any other horror movie of the era.

                 And for horror movies, we suppose that's a good thing.

                 This movie wastes no time depicting Catholicism as a wellspring of repressed guilt, secret sin and bottomless, murderous rage...........(how anybody in their right mind would attend the church in this film is beyond us........Sunday services get regularly interrupted by spectacular, horrific deaths.....the attendees spend far more time shrieking than hymn-singing.....)

                 First to go is darling little 11 year old Brooke Shields, strangled and set on fire during her first Communion.........choked and crisped by a disguised little creepy in a yellow raincoat and plastic mask........(a trope borrowed from "Don't Look Now")

                Prime suspect:  Brooke's bratty, jealous older sister (the unnerving, disturbing Paula Sheppard, playing it like Patty McCormack's Bad Seed......only with the veneer of civility stripped off and only pure unadulterated Id remaining)

               As more bad stuff ensues and more bodies pile up, you might think the movie's blatant attempt to set up Sheppard as an obvious red herring seems clumsy and ham-handed..........especially after the film unmasks a real killer halfway through..........

                Or is that really the real killer? Or a a co-killer?

                While you're contemplating, feel free to binge on everything else "Alice Sweet Alice" references.......Italian Giallos,  Hitchcock guilt-transference, forbidding old nuns waiting for something horrible to happen...........and the movie's premiere attraction......Alphonso DeNoble, who looks like he walked in from 'Fellini Satyricon', playing an obese pedophile who unwisely paws at Paula Sheppard.........

               Stylish, grotesque and most thoroughly one-of-a-kind.........we'll put 3 stars in the collection box for this one (***)........the movie where everybody would have been better off praying at home...