Upon first viewing "Alice Sweet Alice" it comes across like you average Italian Gaillo/Slasher type film but as it slowly unfolds you begin to realize that it's an indictment of how religious fanaticism can effect the minds of those who are not that stable to begin with. It's these self-righteous fanatics who can
committed the most gruesome and unholy of crimes, in the case here inside a Catholic Church,without even the slightest bit of remorse feeling, like Islamic suicide bombers, that their in fact doing God's work.The movie starts off with 11 year-old Karen Spages, Brooks Shield, being grabbed from behind and strangled at the St. Michael Church in Patterson New Jersey, on the very day she's to receive communion, by a masked and unknown assailant. Even though all the evidence to Karen's murder points to her older sister Alice, Paula E. Sheppard, it's very obvious that her killer is an adult, being at least a foot taller and some 30 pounds heavier then Alice.With Alice now the #1 suspect in Karen's death she, who wasn't that normal to begin with, starts to act the part of the killer that she's accused of acting both weird and almost homicidal towards everyone she comes in contact with. When Aunt Annie, Jane Lowry, is brutally attacked on the stairway of Alice's home by the masked and yellow raincoat wearing psycho it's determined, by the police school as well as her parents, that Alice who's suspected of the assault desperately needs mental therapy. Alice committed to a juvenile detention center is then forced to take a polygraph test to determine if she's telling the truth about the two attacks, one being fatal, on her sister Karen and Aunt Annie. The test, which Alice passed, shows that if Alice did in fact commit these two crimes she by passing it has no recollection of them.The movie soon turns into a bloodbath of religious horror with the masked killer coming out into the open and first slashing and then throwing to his death, down a three story landing, Alice's father Dominick Spages and then later slicing up the fat guy who lives down the hall, the landlord, of Alice's apartment house Mr. Alphonso, Alphonso DeNoble. We get to see well before the movie is over, with some half hour left to go, who the masked killer really is which makes the blood-splattering ending, during Communion at St. Michael's Church, a bit anti-climatic.A notch above the usual slasher movies that came out in the 1970's and 1980's "Alice Sweet Alice" or, as it was originally titled, "Communion" is a lot like the 1973 religiously-inspired blockbuster "The Exorcist" in it's treatment of personal guilt in traditional Catholic teachings. In fact the mad killer in the movie felt that the guilt was on his or her victims heads not his own. Recommended
June 30, 2011
