Alice, Sweet Alice (also known as Communion or Holy Terror) is a 1976 independent American slasher film directed by Alfred Sole.
Plot[]
The film is set in Paterson, New Jersey in the early 1960s. Catherine Spages is visiting Father Tom with her two daughters, who both attend St. Michael's Parish Girls' School: 9-year-old Karen and 12-year-old Alice. Karen is preparing for her First Communion and Father Tom gives her his mother's crucifix as a gift. A jealous Alice puts on a creepy, translucent grinning mask, frightening Mrs. Tredoni, Father Tom's housekeeper. Later, Alice steals Karen's porcelain doll and lures her into an abandoned building with it. She jumps out and scares Karen with the grinning mask and locks her in a room. When she lets her out she tells her that if anyone finds out, she'll never see the doll again.
On the day of the First Communion, Karen is attacked and strangled to death, by a person in a translucent mask and yellow raincoat, in a back room as the children enter the front of the church. Her body is dragged away by her right arm and dumped into a bench compartment, which is set on fire with a candle, but not before ripping the crucifix from her neck. Smoke begins to fill the church. Meanwhile, Alice enters the church, carrying her shiny yellow raincoat. She kneels in Karen's place to receive communion when a scream is heard. A curious nun had entered the back room where the confessionals are located, and found Karen's body. People run in, horrified. Catherine is inconsolable.
After Karen's funeral, Catherine's ex-husband Dominick "Dom" Spages arrives in town to help track down the killer. Catherine's sister, Annie DeLorenze, moves in to help Catherine through her grief, but it is soon evident that Alice and Annie despise each other. Catherine tells Alice to deliver a rent cheque to their landlord, Mr. Alphonso. After he fondles and tries to molest her, Alice kills one of his many cats and goes down to the basement, where she lights a candle and puts on her grinning mask.
Descending the stairs to go shopping, Annie is viciously attacked; a raincoated figure in a grinning mask stabs her in the knee, foot, and thigh. At the hospital, Annie cries to her husband Jim that Alice tried to kill her. Catherine says that Annie is only accusing Alice of murdering Karen to divert attention from her own daughter Angela, who was absent at the time of the murder, but Alice is sent to a mental institution for evaluation.
At the hospital with Father Tom, Dom receives a phone call from Angela saying that she has Karen's crucifix and is in hiding. They agree to meet at an abandoned building. Dom follows the killer inside and up the stairs where the killer stabs him in the shoulder and he is knocked out by a brick and tied up. Dom awakens and sees that the killer is in fact Mrs. Tredoni. She killed Karen because she believes that "children pay for the sins of the parents." She reveals that she stabbed Annie by mistake, thinking it was Catherine, whom she considers a whore. She calls Dom and Catherine sinners because they had premarital sex. After Dom bites the crucifix off her neck, Mrs. Tredoni beats him with a rock and pushes him out of the window.
After a pathologist analyzes Dom's corpse, the crucifix is found and Alice is released. When Catherine and Alice go to church Mrs. Tredoni sneaks into the apartment building. As Mrs. Tredoni bangs on his apartment door, Mr. Alphonso wakes up screaming (Alice put a jar of cockroaches on his belly before leaving). He spots Mrs. Tredoni and mistakes her for Alice. She stabs him twice and runs downstairs. However, a policeman witnesses her running out of the back entrance without the mask on.
Mrs. Tredoni goes to church, where the police are stationed outside. Father Tom denies her communion. Mrs. Tredoni points at Catherine, screams that he gave communion to a whore, and violently stabs Father Tom in the neck as the police rush in. The final shot features Alice walking out of the church with Mrs. Tredoni's shopping bag, looking at the bloodstained butcher knife, and glaring at the camera.