Alice, Sweet Alice is the definition of a cult classic. It is a movie that, seemingly, only a handful of people have seen and has been cut, recut, and recut again to fit in with the marketing style of its four separate releases and re-releases. Written, directed, and produced by Alfred Sole, it first saw the light of day under its original title of Communion at The Chicago International Film Festival in late 1976. Eventually picked up by Allied Artists—after Columbia had dropped the film due to a disagreement with one of its other producers, Richard Rosenberg—it would have its name changed to Alice, Sweet Alice after Allied Artists feared that people would see the title of Communion and assume it was a religious film. I mean, I don’t know about you, but as soon as I looked at this poster, I thought to myself; “Yup, that’s going to be another version of The Ten Commandments.”
With its theatrical run done and dusted—and it not exactly breaking any records—Allied Artists couldn’t leave well enough alone and in 1978, Alice, Sweet Alice hit the cinemas again and became Pretty Baby. This was down to the fact that Brooke Shields, in her first role in this film, was hotter than fire so AA decided to try and cash in on her fame. It didn’t really work, so in an almost Hail Mary attempt to bleed as much money out of it as they could, in 1981 it had yet another crack at the whip as Holy Terrorbefore it finally slipped away into obscurity.
With a track record like that, you’d be forgiven for assuming that Alice, Sweet Alice was a complete and utter failure as a movie. That it was nothing more than an attempt by everyone involved to make a quick buck off the rapidly growing slasher genre. If that’s the cash, you’d be wrong. Alice, Sweet Alice might be one of the prototypes for slasher films, but at its heart is the story of sibling rivalry that just happens to descend into knife-wielding, mask-wearing, stabby-stabby madness.
WARNING: Spoilers Ahead For A 46-Year-Old Movie
If you do have a younger brother or sister you’ll remember what it was like growing up with them. They were always the favourite, they always got what they wanted, they’d cry and whine and complain just to get you into trouble and even though some days you’d just want to kill them, you’d never actually go through with it. Would you?
Welcome to the weird, disturbing world of Alice, Sweet Alice.
Alice Spages (Paula Sheppard) seems like a normal 12-year-old girl—even though Sheppard was actually 19 when she played the role—who we first meet when, along with her mother Catherine (Linda Miller) and her 9-year-old sister Karen (Brooke Shields), she’s paying a visit to Father Tom (Rudolph Willrich). Father Tom is the head priest of St. Michael’s Parish Girls’ School that they both attend and he’s invited the family over as he wants to give Karen a present on the eve of her First Communion.
Now I’m going to say right off the bat here that I find Father Tom just a tad creepy. If that was intentional or not I don’t know but he seems far more interested in Karen than he should be and the worse thing is that the mother encourages it. There’s a line in the movies that she delivers, later on, that goes,
You’re going to be the prettiest girl there, wait ’til Father Tom sees you.
And I don’t know about you, but that’s enough to send a shudder down my spine and set off my gag reflex. Then again, I could be reading too much into it.
Anyhow, the gift he gives Karen is his mother’s crucifix—you know, as you would—and this is the catalyst for all of Alice’s weird-ass behaviour from here on out, starting with her donning a plastic mask and scaring the hell out of Father Tom’s housekeeper Mrs. Tredoni (Mildred Clinton). Alice then proceeds to steal Karen’s favourite porcelain doll to lure her into an abandoned building so she can have the scary plastic mask treatment, before locking her in a random room. When she finally lets Karen out she warns her that if she tells anyone what happened she’ll never see her doll again.
*Makes circular finger gestures at head while saying “Cuckoo” over and over.*
After some more of Alice’s zany behaviour at home, and Karen behaving like the brat…er…youngest child she is, we take a little detour to meet their landlord Mr. Alphonso ( Alphonso DeNoble) who’s introduced as the resident pedophile with all the subtlety of a sledgehammer to the face. He’s over-weight, wears nothing but his grubby underwear, lives alone with his cat who he talks to as if he’s its mother, that kind of thing, and then it’s off to Karen’s First Communion, which doesn’t go well for her. At all. This is partly because she seems nervous, but mainly because she’s strangled by someone wearing a plastic mask and a yellow raincoat. Yup, that’ll put a crimp in your day.
Now considering that Brooke Shields couldn’t have been much older than the character she was playing at the time, her death is pretty good and not the horrible over-the-top mess you’d expect from a child actor. Add to that the utter shock and horror that is displayed by the rest of the cast on the discovery of Karen’s body and you’ve got yourself a pretty disturbing scene.
With Karen in the ground, we’re introduced to Catherine’s ex-husband, Dominick “Dom” Spages (Niles McMaster), who’s in town to help find Karen’s killer and Catherine’s sister, Annie DeLorenze (Jane Lowery) who moves in with them to help Catherine through her grief. It’s obvious that Alice has nothing but contempt for her old man, and nothing but hatred for her aunt, and after listening to them talk for five minutes you probably will too but that’s okay folks, as this is a horror movie and you need character’s like that so when/if they get what’s coming to them you can cheer and not feel bad about it.
The hatred that Alice has for her aunt isn’t just a one-way street, mind you, which we find out as soon as the kids leave the apartment, with good old Aunt Annie “suggesting” that Alice might’ve bumped off her sister. She bases this accusation on the fact that Alice was the last person to see Karen alive, and that she had the veil from Karen’s dress in her pocket. This is further backed up in the next scene when Dominick’s visit to the local gendarme doesn’t go particularly well. They want to talk to Alice about the veil and pretty much come right out and say, “We think she did it,” to which he tells them to go copulate themselves and walks out.
After he’s left we find that John Q. Law has spoken to the principal at Alice’s school who has made repeated request’s for Alice to see a psychiatrist but for some reason or another these requests have been ignored This leads one of the coppers to look over her school records and offer his own diagnosis of,
This kid’s nuts!
Back at The Spages’ residence, all is going as smoothly as you’d expect. Catherine’s upstairs having a minor breakdown while Alice and her Aunt are downstairs ripping chunks out of each other, not literally you understand, over spilled milk, which is literal, you understand, as Alice drops a pint of milk and it all kicks off. Catherine eventually comes to the rescue and calms everyone down before sending Alice off to give the rent to Pedobear Alphonso. This is not the brightest idea she’s ever had.
Mr. Alphonso looks like a writer’s idea of a pedophile. He’s supposed to portray a man who molests children in between snacks. The kind of person you’d keep as far away from your kids as you could, preferably with the use of a large cattle prod, and yet here’s Alice’s mum quite happy to send her last remaining child down into the lair of the fat ass beast. What is it about horror movies and people having their common sense glands removed?
Alice visits Mr. Alphonso, Mr. Alphonso tries to molest Alice, and Alice kills Mr. Alphonso’s cat. Which is a fair trade in my opinion, if somewhat harsh on the cat.
From here on out, it’s all set up for you to think that Alice is bat-sh*t crazy and would rather eat your soul than look at you. We see shots of Alice setting fire to bugs then we see the plastic masked killer lurking under the stairs before trying to cut Aunt Annie’s leg off. While in hospital Loving Aunt Annie accuses Alice of trying to kill her, and, even though Catherine says she’s only doing it to cover up for her own daughter Angela (Kathy Rich) who herself could do with a visit from the men in white coats, this result’s in Alice being carted off to the for a lie detector test which Alice fails, leading to Alice being sent for psychiatric evaluation. Somewhere off-screen, Alice’s school principal must’ve been dancing a merry jig.
So with Crazy Alice in Crazy Town, Rubbish Dad Dom gets a phone call from a distressed Angela who says she’s run away from home, as Loving Aunt Annie won’t let her return Karen’s Crucifix, which she’s somehow managed to get her hands on. After Rubbish Dad has calmed Angela down they agree to meet in an abandoned building. ‘Cause, yeah, that sounds safe. On arriving Dominick sees someone in a plastic face mask and yellow raincoat who he follows inside believing to be Angela. When he finally catches up with her he tells her she doesn’t have to be afraid of him and she replies by smashing his brains in with a rock. This leads me to believe that Rubbish Dad could’ve done with working on his people skills a little bit more. With Dominick somehow still alive, the plastic mask killer decides the best thing to do is to tie him up with some rope and throw him out of a large set of double doors to his doom, but just before she does that she removes her mask to reveal that she is, in fact, Mrs. Tredoni.
Wait. What? Yes, folks, it turns out that the plastic face killer was Father Tom’s housekeeper all along. Bet you didn’t see that coming. No, you didn’t. Stop lying. Bad reader! It turns out that Mrs. Tredoni is somewhat f*cking mental and has decided that God wants Dominick and his “whor*”—her words, not mine—ex-wife punished for indulging in pre-marital sex. Well, I’m glad that’s all cleared up then.
After she’s thrown Dominick into the great wide open Mrs. Tredoni takes a quick trip to confession, where she doesn’t really confess anything, and heads back home and goes about her daily chores until she is interrupted by Catherine who has stopped by to visit with Father Tom. This culminates in a scene in the kitchen where Mrs. Tredoni explains how the children must pay for the sins of the parents and how she was sent there to look after Father Tom, not Catherine. Luckily for Catherine, Father Tom shows up before she can be chopped into hamburger meat.
Down at the mortuary, the autopsy reveals that Dominick had a cross lodged in his throat that he bit off of Mrs. Tredoni before she hucked him out the window. This gives the police the idea that Alice might not be guilty after all and maybe we should take a closer look at Mrs. Tredoni.
By this time Not-So-Crazy-Yet-Still-Pretty-Fricking-Mental Alice has been released from the looney bin and as her first act of sanity freedom, she dresses up like the plastic face killer, breaks into Pedobear’s apartment, and puts a jar of co*ckroaches on him as he sleeps. After Alice leaves, Mrs. Tredoni, dressed in the same outfit—don’t you just hate that when that happens?—appears and knocks on Pedobear’s door. He wakes, freaks out at the co*ckroaches, and runs outside where he bumps into Mrs. Tredoni who he mistakes for Alice. Trying to strangle her, he accidentally pulls off her mask and gets a large kitchen knife in his chest for his troubles.
Mrs. Tredoni makes a break for it and heads to the Church where she waits to take communion, while outside Father Tom is being told by the police that Mrs. Tredoni is the killer. To which he replies;
Don’t worry, I’ll get her to come quietly.
Famous last words, eh?
As she waits in line for her wafer, Father Tom refuses and explain’s that the police are waiting for her. Mrs. Tredoni doesn’t take this news very well, as you can imagine, and after the line
But you give it to that whor*!!!
in reference to Catherine, she stabs Father Tom repeatedly in the neck with her handy, dandy stabby-stabby.
While everyone else rushes to the front of the church to be near Father Tom, we see Alice walk to where Mrs. Tredoni was sitting, pick up her bag and stare into the camera as the movie ends, suggesting that she herself is just as bat sh*t crazy as Old Mrs. Tredoni.
Alice, Sweet Alice was ahead of its time, and if it had been released a couple of years later, I honestly believe that it would’ve found the love and respect it deserved in the wake of Halloween. The Plastic Face Killer is as easily unnerving as Michael, Jason, or Freddy, but because what was to become known as the slasher movie was in its infancy, Alice, Sweet Alice just seemed to get swept out with the trash. I doubt that the never-ending re-releases helped its legacy either, with fans undoubtedly thinking it was another cash grab in the wake of John Carpenter’s masterpiece.
This is a shame as what Alfred Sole tried to do with the film was a very, very brave move. And I’m not talking about running his ass into a ton of debt and having to remortgage his house to pay for it. Trying to make a horror movie where the main protagonist is a young child? That takes cajones so big that he must’ve had difficulty sitting down.
I know that that is an overplayed trope nowadays—killer kids, not having big cajones—but back in 1976 it was something that had rarely been tried, and even though you find out towards the end that it isn’t Alice who has gone all murder, death, kill, with the final shot he does leave the lingering question as to whether or not Mrs. Tredoni was responsible for all the murders we have just witnessed.
I’ll admit that the music that accompanies it is a bit cheesy, and the whole thing is, at times, held together with a weird and slightly disturbing sexual undertone involving Alice, but overall it’s a brilliant little scare fest and a great way to spend 108 minutes. So do yourself a favour, if you love slasher flicks and you’ve yet to see Alice, Sweet Alice, rectify that as soon as you can. Then maybe, just maybe, we can start pushing for it to be recognised as one of the forefathers/mothers of an entire genre.
