Alice, Sweet Alice

An American giallo in Catholic New Jersey, and disturbing. After a child is murdered at her first communion, suspicion falls on her strange older sister, and the film plays as a nasty mystery soaked in Catholic guilt and translucent yellow raincoats. It features a young Brooke Shields in an early role.

It is more artful and more upsetting than the standard slasher, closer in spirit to the Italian gialli it borrows from, with a real sense of religious dread. The masked child killer is a unsettling image.

An overlooked, atmospheric American horror film with a mean streak.