Director: Alfred Sole
Cast: Linda Miller, Mildred Clinton, Paula Sheppard, Niles McMaster, Brooke Shields
Screenplay: Rosemary Ritvo, Alfred Sole
107 mins. Rated R.

I’ll be honest: twelve years ago, I had no idea that I’d still be doing 31 Days of Horror all these years later, but here we are. It’s October again, and we’re covering a wide swath of movies this month from across different eras of horror, famous and infamous, big names and little movies, so let’s start with a movie celebrating its fiftieth anniversary this year and brought Brooke Shields (The Other Guys) to prominence: Alice, Sweet Alice.

Mere minutes before receiving first communion, young Karen Spages (Shields) is brutally murdered by an unknown assailant, and all fingers seem to point to her sister Alice (Paula Sheppard, Liquid Sky), but this horrific crime could not have been committed by a twelve-year-old girl…right? As her mother Catherine (Linda Miller, 17 Again) attempts to uncover the truth, more bodies are piling up, and the evidence against Alice keeps building.

With notable influences from Nicolas Roeg’s Don’t Look Now and Hitchcock’s career catalogue, Alice, Sweet Alice is an unyieldingly cruel movie from writer/director Alfred Sole (Pandemonium). Originally released as Communion, this movie is surrounded by Roman Catholic imagery, and many of its horrors are witnessed in a world where the religious doctrine is closing around the characters, with religious relics peppering each set, and the murders seemingly punishment for perceived sins, this is bold film for its time period that is frequently unrelenting in its depictions of graphic violence. Sole stated that he wanted all the violence to be relatable, so that his audience would be able to at least imagine the pain inflicted on the victims, and it’s one of the reasons that the violence feels so visceral despite large stretches of the movie focused on the mysteries and the characters. The killer wears a translucent face mask that was popular in the 1950s and recognizable for an audience of the 1970s, adding a layer of homegrown horror, and the mere idea that these acts of violence could be perpetrated by a child, even a troubled one, is shocking and effective.

Miller, Sheppard, and Shields are all quite good here, and Sheppard in particular gets a lot of room to shine as Alice. You get the sense that even Alice is not sure if she’s committing the murders after awhile as the evidence seems to stand high against her, and there are plenty of twists and turns to the mystery that had me guessing until the answer is finally confirmed, and the movie’s themes further establish themselves in the final few scenes. Despite that, the pacing does struggle once the third act is set in motion and most of the cards are out on the table, but the atmosphere and goodwill of the first hour really keeps this one from floundering under its ideas.

There’s a lot more going on beneath the surface of Alice, Sweet Alice, and it effectively showcases Sole’s disdain for organized religion and his viewing of the unraveling of American family ideas in the complicated and uncertain 1970s. The very idea that this community would view one sibling capable of killing another so easily is indicative of that unraveling, and Sole’s integration of the religious iconography almost links this idea to Cain and Abel, especially in having Karen’s murder occur at a church in the moments before First Communion, as if to confront the idea that death before Communion doesn’t allow a cleansing of the soul, which seems like such a cruel fate for a child built into the church’s doctrine.

Alice, Sweet Alice is a lot more complex that it’s relatively simple, albeit disturbing, premise. There are surprises in store that I won’t get into here, but I was entertained and fascinated through most of it. While it struggles in its back half, it’s not enough to derail the beguiling narrative.

3½/5
-Kyle A. Goethe