Alice, Sweet Alice (a.k.a. Communion, Holy Terror)

I suppose there’s something to the fact that I’m writing on Walpurgisnacht about Alice, Sweet Alice, the gothic Catholic family horror slasher drama wherein we expect some sort of supernatural terror, ala The Exorcist, but instead get psychological corruption, familial dissolution, and general social malaise in a 1960s Patterson, New Jersey, very Catholic family named the Pages. (Note: Walpurgisnacht is the high unholy day of Satanists and black magicians since time immemorial; it was that day when the witches were said, long ago, to fly to the Brocken in the Herz Mountains in Germany, to perform the rites of the Black Mass, cavort with the Devil, and kiss his ass.)

Along the way, we have the incredible pairing of Alphonse De Noble with Niles McMaster, two actors that featured prominently in Joel M. Reed’s excretable cinematic abomination Bloodsucking Freaks (a.k.a. The Incredible Torture Show), a grindhouse splatterfest of torture and gleeful sadism that women’s groups picketed as being the grisliest piece of celluloid offal ever shat from the bowels of an old-fashioned editing machine.

How both of them ended up in Alice, Sweet Alice is a bit of a mystery. McMaster was an old soap opera actor; De Noble a Day of the Locust-type weirdo of about four hundred pounds or more who worked at a nightclub. Eli Roth, in the audio commentary to the Troma DVD release of Freaks, confused De Noble, who played a sex trafficker from the Middle East in the film, with actor Allan Delay, who played Creasy Silo, the critic who is kidnapped by one of the tall, skinny black girls who work for Sardu the Sadistic. (Go watch the movie.)

Roth, the famous director of Hostel, and a supposed “gore hound,” gets his facts patently wrong there, claiming Delay died “weighing over four hundred pounds.” No, that was De Noble. Do your research, Eli.

Getting back to it, Father Tom (Rudolph Willrich) comes over for dinner at the Pages, a family consisting of recently divorced mother Catherine (Linda Miller, mother of Lost Boys star Jason Patric with Exorcist star Jason Miller), along with sisters Alice (Paula Sheppard, whose only other film role is in the midnight movie scifi classic Liquid Sky) and Karen (a young Brooke Shields, whose post Alice stardom was used as a marketing ploy by the videocassette companies). Father Tom gives Karen a crucifix and rosary for her First Communion. Alice gets jealous, putting on a yellow rain slicker and a weird, clear plastic Halloween mask with red painted lips, and scares the Italian housekeeper, Mrs. Tredoni (Mildred Clinton).

During Karen’s First Communion, Alice—or somebody dressed just like her—murders Karen, stuffing her burning body in a church pew and stealing the crucifix.

Everyone suspects Alice, who collects giant roaches in mason jars and does other weird, mental stuff. She unleashes these cockroaches on the morbidly obese upstairs landlord, played by De Noble, who is filthy, repugnant, forever spinning old operatic albums, and sweating in his soiled clothing. He roughly resembles “Anton LaVey after a month at Golden Corral,” to quote one commentator whom I can’t remember from an article I read twenty years ago. (Anyway, I always remember that line, as it makes me laugh.)

De Noble lives upstairs—in the cramped, filthy, dank, dour apartment of the mind. There, he lives with his cats (his curling, fur-clad, inspired familiar) and spins his records, recordings of yesteryear. He is immensely obese, sweating, filthy—a repellent slob. His predilection is for children; he’s a secret but unsurprising pedophile who tries to rape Alice, to which she responds by strangling his cat. His little “pussy.”

All very pregnant with meaning. The cramped hallways, the confining, claustrophobic cinematography, all point to the repression of the Catholic Church—its claustrophobic and narrow imprisonment of the sexuality represented by the budding, confused Alice, who, it is noted, refuses to tell her mother she has started menstruating—the curse of Eve.

The taint of the blood is apparent in the fractured family. McMaster is the recalcitrant, absent father come home. The family is in dissolute disrepair, just as much as the religion of Father Tom, who imparts the promise of the male-driven salvation proffered by the crucified Christ. Murder and betrayal here begin the cycle of killing by the mysterious yellow-raincoat-wearing, masked killer—likewise in disrepair. The smoke billowing from the church pew is a symbol of the smoke of Hellfire. Karen murdered instead of saved, her lifeless body left to wither, blacken, and burn; the crucifix claimed by unearned, yet eager and jealous hands. Seeking the blood of Christ, having only the sin of menstruation. The father absent, the aunt (June Lowry) replacing him being stabbed and rejected. There is no Heaven here—only the repulsive fat man in the upstairs abode.

Alfred Sole, the writer-director of Alice, Sweet Alice, was a gay man who was excommunicated by the Church for making a softcore porn film. Whatever grievances are aired here against the Church stare as coldly, as resolutely, and condemnatory as the statues of Mary so displayed in the film. The Freudian subtext is there, for anyone who struggles to unearth it.

The movie drags at the end, but is, otherwise, a holy terror no less half as sweet.

Paranoia in the Parish | Crime Thriller | Full Movie | Brooke Shields | Alice Sweet Alice

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