Eh.  The 1976 film, Alice, Sweet Alice, is one of the few slasher films to have found critical acclaim and to have been seriously studied in the years after its release but I have to admit that it’s never done much for me.

It’s a film that takes place in 1961, in a Catholic neighborhood of Patterson, New Jersey.  It’s perhaps the ugliest setting of a film outside of Combat Shock.  The houses that we see are run-down.  The apartment building in which much of the action takes place is dirty and rat-infested.  Even the local church looks like it could use a bit of spring cleaning.  Of course, if you think the neighborhood looks ugly, you should see some of the people who live in it.  There’s really not anyone in this film who could be considered to be at all appealing.  Everyone’s either angry or disturbed or grotesquely obese or pervy.  It’s one of those films where everything is so dirty and sleazy that it’s hard not kind of laugh at it all.  John Waters could have worked wonders with this neighborhood but Alfred Sole, Alice’s director, seems to take his story just a little too seriously to give it the camp approach that it deserves.

(In fact, probably the only appealing sight in Alice, Sweet Alice is a picture of John F. Kennedy that is seen hanging in a few offices.  There’s a lot of not positive things that can be said about JFK but at least he was handsome.)

Anyway, the plot deals with Alice Spages (Paul Sheppard), an annoying twelve year-old sociopath who lives in the desolate apartment building and who enjoys tormenting people by putting on a Halloween mask and scaring them.  Alice is basically a bully but I think we’re supposed to sympathize with her because she’s rebelling against the suffocating hypocrisy all around her.  Again, whatever.  I was a brat when I was 12 years old too.

Alice’s younger sister, Karen (Brooke Shields, making her film debut), is as perfect as Alice is troublesome.  Everyone loves Karen, except for Alice who is obviously jealous.  On the day of her first communion, Karen is strangled to death by someone wearing a Halloween mask and a yellow raincoat, one that looks a lot like the one that Alice owns.  The killer steals Karen’s crucifix and tries to set the body on fire.  Father Tom (Rudolph Willrich) is annoyed that the ceremony has been interrupted.  Actually, it’s hard to think of a moment in this film in which Father Tom isn’t annoyed by something.

Did Alice murder her sister?  A lot of people think so, especially after other people who get on Alice’s nerves end up getting attacked.  Alice ends up getting sent to a mental hospital but, of course, Alice isn’t the murderer.  Who is the murderer?  No need for me to say.  If you watch the film, you’ll figure it out easily on your own.

Alice, Sweet Alice is often described as being an early slasher film.  If anything, it’s more of an American giallo, with the emphasis being on figuring out who is the killer behind the mask.  Many critics have praised Alice, Sweet Alice for its atmosphere and its anti-religious subtext but, to be honest, I’ve always found it to be kind of boring.  Part of the problem is that every character is so repulsive (physically, mentally, and morally) that it’s difficult to really care about whether or not they die or if they’re the guilty party.  Even Alice comes across like someone who is destined to start fires once she grows up.  None of the actors gives a good enough performance to hold your attention.  The film attempts to criticize the Church, as many giallo films did.  But one need only compare Alice Sweet Alice to other anti-clerical giallo films, like Lucio Fulci’s Don’t Torture A Duckling or Aldo Lado’s Who Saw Her Die? , to see how simplistic and superficial Alice, Sweet Alice‘s approach really is.

Anyway, a lot of people will disagree with this review and that’s fine.  Some films work for some people while failing to work for others and, in this case, Alice Sweet Alice is just a film that does not work for me.  Que sera sera.