Poor little Alice(Paula E. Sheppard). Mercurial and withdrawn since her parents divorce, all of the attention is lavished on little sister Karen (a very young Brooke Shields) by their rather glacial, newly single mom,Katherine (Linda Miller).
When Karen is found murdered in church on the day of her first Communion, all eyes on on Alice, who has Karen's veil in hand, and was ready to take her sister's place at the altar when the body was discovered. Soon bodies are piling up around the fractured family...but is Alice a sociopath or just a little girl fractured by both the slights of her upbringing (outright disdain from her aunt, a borderline pedophile landlord, an absent father) and the fact that she knows something regarding the crimes no one else has yet noticed?
This film is a low budget classic of atmosphere. Gore is minimal, but tension is high, with a range of carefully selected music, a muted, faded color palette and a lot of giallo style POV close up reaction shots, and a claustrophobic series of sets, building a slow boil tension that even the sometimes clunky dialog and somewhat stiff acting can't break.
It's an object lesson in how much can be done with quite little in the way of budget, and everything from the Catholic mass imagery to the rain destroying Katherine's careful coif after a brutal stabbing attack on her sister is placed with intent and care. Even when the killer is revealed just below the half way point, it just ups the ante for the remainder of the film My only real quibbles are that some of the character backstory and motivation is sketched quite thinly (particularly that of the killer, and the precise details of the divorce that fractured the family) and that those well crafted mood making moments were not let run just a tad longer, as the stills have a way of burrowing into your head and staying there.
Given that a lot of the more straightforward expository scenes are written a touch awkward and thin, shaving a few seconds off them would have not done any harm, and made the transitions slightly less jarring.
In any case, this film deserves to be remembered for far more than the first screen appearance of Ms. Shields, spent the $5 on Amazon and grab yourself a copy.
For a nice little double feature, screen this with the equally atmosphere filled and under watched "Dead & Buried" (which I've also reviewed) and lament for a moment what thrillers used to be before the current vogue for sheer shock value.
When Karen is found murdered in church on the day of her first Communion, all eyes on on Alice, who has Karen's veil in hand, and was ready to take her sister's place at the altar when the body was discovered. Soon bodies are piling up around the fractured family...but is Alice a sociopath or just a little girl fractured by both the slights of her upbringing (outright disdain from her aunt, a borderline pedophile landlord, an absent father) and the fact that she knows something regarding the crimes no one else has yet noticed?
This film is a low budget classic of atmosphere. Gore is minimal, but tension is high, with a range of carefully selected music, a muted, faded color palette and a lot of giallo style POV close up reaction shots, and a claustrophobic series of sets, building a slow boil tension that even the sometimes clunky dialog and somewhat stiff acting can't break.
It's an object lesson in how much can be done with quite little in the way of budget, and everything from the Catholic mass imagery to the rain destroying Katherine's careful coif after a brutal stabbing attack on her sister is placed with intent and care. Even when the killer is revealed just below the half way point, it just ups the ante for the remainder of the film My only real quibbles are that some of the character backstory and motivation is sketched quite thinly (particularly that of the killer, and the precise details of the divorce that fractured the family) and that those well crafted mood making moments were not let run just a tad longer, as the stills have a way of burrowing into your head and staying there.
Given that a lot of the more straightforward expository scenes are written a touch awkward and thin, shaving a few seconds off them would have not done any harm, and made the transitions slightly less jarring.
In any case, this film deserves to be remembered for far more than the first screen appearance of Ms. Shields, spent the $5 on Amazon and grab yourself a copy.
For a nice little double feature, screen this with the equally atmosphere filled and under watched "Dead & Buried" (which I've also reviewed) and lament for a moment what thrillers used to be before the current vogue for sheer shock value.