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Review: Alice, Sweet Alice

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While Alice, Sweet Alice (alternatively titled Communion and Holy Terror) ostensibly takes place in the early 1960s, its themes are decidedly post-Watergate, betraying its 1976 release date (alongside the anachronistic costumes and hairstyles).



The film is aggressively critical of authority, adopting a tone that is pessimistic to an almost absurd, surreal degree. The police, for example, are incompetent at best and corrupt at worst—quick to jump to conclusions and condescendingly dismissive of the public’s justifiable concerns. The church is likewise utterly ineffectual; whatever spiritual guidance religion may provide is irrevocably, irreconcilably tainted by the moral hypocrisy of the congregation. Even the family unit has eroded beyond recognition; parents are obliviously neglectful, often inadvertently favoring one child over another for totally arbitrary reasons. This pervasive sense of societal decay and the desecration of “traditional values” is personified by the character of Mr. Alphonso, a grotesque, lecherous landlord that spies on his tenants, slurps cat food straight out of the can… and shamelessly lusts after little girls. It's an inherently cruel and fundamentally nihilistic setting, predominantly populated by sadists and sociopaths; no wonder, then, that the victims of its myriad iniquities and indignities are so prone to brutal violence.


This relentlessly bleak atmosphere makes Alice, Sweet Alice oppressively unnerving before a single drop of blood has been shed (though the obligatory masked killer rapidly accumulates a respectable pile of corpses—in quite gruesome fashion, at that). Its flavor of horror is quintessentially ‘70s: gritty, cynical, and gleefully transgressive. It’s giallo by way of John Waters—and I adored every gloriously excessive frame of it.

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