Alice, Sweet Alice

Alice, Sweet Alice

United States - 1976

Director- Alfred Sole

Goodtimes Home Video, 1985, VHS

Run time - 1 hour, 48 min.

I’m pretty sure this movie is going to suck. It’s too old to be really graphic with such a big budget, and I’m sure I would have heard about it if it was actually good. The religio-horror thing is usually more borror and so I enter into this with great hesitancy. Though for a dollar, I can’t ask much.

Alice is the somewhat mean and mischievous older sister of Brooke Shields. She seems a bit evil or something but I’m guessing she’s just going through puberty. While Shields whines and shrieks her way onto my hit-list, the morbidly obese landlord shares a can of food with his cats.

At her first communion, Shields is choked to death, apparently by Alice, and her body set ablaze in one of the back rooms of the church. OK, that’s pretty fucked up; but hey at least there’s no more whining right?

Some cops get involved in trying to find the killer, as does the estranged re-married father (Niles McMaster of Bloodsucking Freaks). The only people who don’t think Alice is the killer are her parents who stubbornly refuse to let the police question her.

The giant fat landlord sexually assaults Alice who deters him by smashing one of his cats to the floor, escaping to her secret table of creepy stuff down in the basement. Ascending the stairs just as her harsh harpy of an aunt is leaving, she stabs the living shit out of her aunts leg and foot, later pretending to have been frightened and hiding in the basement during the event.

Quite a few minutes of screaming women follow, and Alice is made to take a polygraph which reveals that she is both lying and telling the truth in all the appropriately creepiest spots, and is checked into a psychiatric hospital where she whines. Meanwhile, the nosy dad is killed by what is revealed to be the church housekeeper who proceeds to bleed the film of interesting plot development as effectively as she has her theoretically implied previous victims.

The detectives chatter over their radios, and the housekeeper runs around and kills the witnesses to her crimes, but at this point I really only care enough to flush slightly at the brief paroxysms of onscreen violence that continue perplexingly to implicate an adolescent (told ya) Alice. This movie feels like it’s in its third hour of trying to convince me that a womans menstrual cycle is somehow evil, and all the initial pleasant gory surprise has faded into distraction.