An American Giallo


Just re-watched ALICE after many, many years. It has superb direction, cinematography (although, curiously, no credited D.P.) and editing. In the trivia, it says that the director was heavily influenced by Hitchcock, but I also surmise after my latest viewing that he was also a student of the Italian "giallo" genre of horror/suspense films that were prevalent in the 1960s and '70s, which featured characters suffering from severe psychosis, usually due to sexual repression and/or Catholic guilt. This film had both in spades.

Sometimes its low budget shows itself, but overall, ALICE SWEET ALICE is an excellent, atmospheric psychological thriller, with the crumbling grandeur of Paterson, NJ providing the perfect backdrop.

reply

It reminded me a lot of a Dario Argento giallo movie. Really enjoyed this one.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7ikuayLl4I

reply

exactly like Blood Red with it's violence.

reply

this film has such dread and blackness and insensitivity and callousness. it just shows you all it's violence in such cold, disturbing, and explicit ways. it is so eerie and harrowing with it's perfect ways of showing violence and emotional trauma. it's also so grim. you have to be affected by it emotionally and you have to be disturbed by it because everything is done so realistically and effectively.

you feel so much pain for the mother when she loses her daughter and you feel so much pain for the sweet and innocent Karen when she is killed. there are very few deaths in a movie that have made me this deeply depressed or distressed or traumatized or moved or impacted emotionally or disturbed psychologically as this death did. that is how much pain and emotional sadness and depression that I felt for her.

but they could have developed Karen's character more than they did to make you feel worse about her death. you barely know anything about her character and she barely talks at all. with more scenes with her and more time with her and more dialogue from her, her death could have been so much more devastating than it already was.

it's low budget? it doesn't have a low budget. and it's budget doesn't show itself to make it look cheap or be cheap.

it's violence is so well done. it has the best kind of violence that a movie can have which is the '70s showing you just enough of the violence without showing you everything so that way your mind fills in the blanks of what you don't see and you believe that the violence actually happened. this is also the kind of violence depiction that Hitchcock used to use in like Psycho. so in that way it could have been inspired by Hitchcock.

reply

Not to mention, bright red red, which was prevalent in Giallo movies at the time.

reply

Definitely a giallo rip-off. Just as confusing and tacky as well.

reply