Alice, Sweet Alice (a.k.a. Communion) 1976 What a backstory this film has......a first feature for director Alfred Sole an architect in Paterson New Jersey. His previous filmmaking attempt, a short porn spoof, got him excommunicated by the local Catholic Diocese.
You could say that Sole took furious revenge on his church with 'Alice Sweet Alice'......a horror film drawing heavily on Catholic iconography and bookended by brutal murders committed in the church itself......right in the middle of a Sunday communion service. Holy corpses!
Sole scraped together enough of a budget for a fast, cheap shoot in his Paterson hometown and recruited New York actors for his cast. Remarkably, for a fledgling, barely experienced director, the resulting film displays some powerful, assured work in its visuals, editing and creation of suspense and terror.
Cribbing style and inspiration from the best, Sole drew heavily from Nicolas Roeg's stunning 1973 thriller "Don't Look Now", as well as Hitchcock and Giallo-master Dario Argento. But what really set the film apart was its aggressive reliance on Catholicism as a touchstone for psychosis, guilt-drenched obsession and horrific death......tropes that other films had only lightly dabbled in.....
To start out with, you won't find a single sympathetic character in sight here, with the possible exception of Father Tom (Rudolph Willrich), the church's young priest whom everybody dotes on, especially his cranky housekeeper, the widowed Mrs. Tredoni.(Mildred Clinton). Virtually everybody in this film stays in a permanent state of hot temper.
Harried divorcee Catherine (Linda MIller) can hardly cope with her raging, bratty 13 year old daughter Alice (Paula Sheppard, fully channeling Patty McCormick's 'Bad Seed'). Alice can't stand the attention her mother and Father Tom give to her angelic little sister Karen (Brooke Shields, her first film role).....especially on the eve of Karen's first communion.
Come Sunday at church, Karen never makes it to the big event, due to her being strangled and set ablaze by a masked, raincoated figure who's suspiciously about the same size as Alice. And in the ongoing symphony of screams and panicked hysteria, how does Alice end up with Karen's communion veil.....(which she jealously coveted in a previous scene....)
Things only get worse for the grief stricken, nerve-wracked Catherine and the always angrily whining Alice.......the diminutive raincoat slasher pops to severely wound Catherine's abrasive sister and then moves on even more vicious, blood soaked killings.
The slasher, inevitably, is finally confronted and cornered at another fully packed Sunday service......leading to even more shrieks, hysteria and freely spilling blood. How the Diocese convinces any parishioners to set foot in this place is beyond me.....and Church elders must have felt frustrated they couldn't excommunicate Alfred Sole twice.
Horror film buffs will love savoring all the homages and references in play here......from Hitchcock's slow ominous tracking shots to the eerie child-like chanting in Stephen Lawrence's music, evoking Argento's "The Bird With The Crystal Plumage".
And I can guarantee you won't see another film with a character as pathetic, grotesque and disgusting as the morbidly obese Alphonse DeNoble, a sad figure typecast as a pathetic, grotesque, disgusting and morbidly obese landlord..........enough said, you'll simply have to see him to believe him
.....just another facet of "Alice Sweet Alice" that makes it essential viewing for all horror completists who, shall I say.....possess....uh catholic tastes. 3 & 1/2 stars (***1/2)
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