Alice Spages (Paula Sheppard) is a very disturbed girl. That's not very surprising when you look at her surroundings - her family and neighbors are part freak show, part bad melodrama. There's her little sister Karen (Brooke Shields), one of those children who reign over their parents in a dictatorship of crushing sweetness. Their mother Catherine (Linda Miller) is not immune to Karen's influence, and treats Alice with in turns hotness and coldness, all the while trying gamely to ignore the psychic damage her child has already suffered. The father Dom (Niles McMaster) is usually absent; he has a wife to take care of. Alice's aunt Annie (Jane Lowry) hates the girl with a passion and uses every opportunity to demean her, very much like a human harpy - a harpy out of love, of course, or so she tells her sister (who sides with her over her daughter in any case).
Also part of this fine gathering of human specimens are the Spages' ridiculously overweight, child-groping landlord (Alphonso DeNoble); Father Tom (Rudolph Willrich), the local Catholic priest who seems a little too close to Catherine for someone living celibate, but is also by far the least fucked up person around; and Father Tom's housekeeper Mrs. Tredoni (Mildred Clinton) whose photograph you'll see when you look up "mean-spirited bigot" in your encyclopedia of choice. I could make this list even longer, but I think you get the gist.
On the day of her first communion, Karen is murdered by someone wearing a yellow raincoat and a mask - the same kind of raincoat and mask Alice likes to wear when she's out playing one of her more disturbing games.
After Annie is also attacked and her nice auntie identifies her niece as her attacker, the police concentrate on blaming the deeds on Alice. The girl herself swears that she's innocent and that the real perpetrator is her dead sister.
Her mother and the quickly arriving father don't know what to believe, but they are sure that their daughter hasn't killed her sister. Dom turns to the ways of the amateur sleuth to find the true killer while the body count mounts.
Alice, Sweet Alice is a strange and quite unique piece of work. A mix of sometimes hysterically overacted melodrama, American hyper-realism and the hypnotic trance state of the (anti-Catholic/anti-authoritarian representatives of the) Giallo shouldn't produce a watchable movie, least of all a very good (if weird) one. Nonetheless it does that here. The film's director Alfred Sole shows a fine sense for storytelling through visual moods. His camera is always on the look-out for the creepy and the ambiguous in the ordinary.
I already mentioned the hysterically melodramatic tone most of the actors reach for on the slightest provocation, but their quite purposeful overacting makes for a very effective contrast to the many subtle touches and moments of the film. The hysteria makes the wrongness of certain subdued gestures more obvious than it would otherwise be. A dialogue about the truthfulness of any reaction seems to be going on right under the skin of the movie. All characters here are hiding their lies, probably even from themselves, some behind screaming and some behind silence. Alice is the ideal screen for everyone's projections, leaving behind a twisted and creepy little girl - her guilt or innocence don't matter here at all.
Alice Sweet Alice shows an interesting direction the American horror film could have taken. Not a real genre anymore, but a crossroads where other genres meet to look under the skin of society (or, if you're so inclined, the world); perhaps like David Lynch without his love for the enigmatic or Brian DePalma without his egocentrism.
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