ALICE, SWEET ALICE introduced Brooke Shields to the screen but 88 Films' new Blu-ray edition returns the spotlight to the film's real "holy terror."

When young Karen Spages (Brooke Shields, ENDLESS LOVE) is murdered on the day of her first communion, suspicion naturally points towards her troubled older sister Alice (Paula Sheppard, LIQUID SKY) who stalks her apartment building in weird masks and plays cruel pranks on her family and neighbors. The only people who do not seem to suspect Alice are her beleaguered mother Catherine (Linda Miller, AN UNMARRIED WOMAN) and her estranged father Dom (Niles McMaster, BLOODSUCKING FREAKS) who returns for the funeral. While the police focus on Alice - especially after her domineering aunt Annie (Jane Lowry) hysterically claims Alice stabbed her - Dom carries out his own investigation with the help of his former brother-in-law Father Tom (Rudolph Willrich, NINE 1/2 WEEKS) with Annie's own troubled daughter Angela (Kathy Rich) as his prime suspect. When another murder occurs while Alice is under psychiatric observation, she is released but returns to her old tricks even as the killer continues to stalk her family. Is she the final victim or a kindred spirit?

An ambitious Paterson, New Jersey-lensed period sleeper that has justifiably become a cult classic – in part due to the presence of a then-unknown Shields and the film's unfortunate public domain status throughout the years after Allied Artist changed the title from COMMUNION without copyrighting it – ALICE, SWEET ALICE has been considered an American giallo due not so much to its knife-wielding stalker as its exploration of the twisted psyches of seemingly obvious red herring characters: including Alphonso DeNoble (NIGHT OF THE ZOMBIES) Fellini-grotesque apartment building landlord and Peter Bosche as a senile monsignor driving parish housekeeper Mrs. Tredoni (Mildred Clinton, SERPICO) understandably batty, as well as the religious and familial pressures that shape monsters. The film was the first of three mainstream films from writer/director Alfred Sole (TANYA'S ISLAND) who graduated from the University of Florence with a degree in architecture and would later became a production designer.

Produced as COMMUNION and released theatrically as Allied Artists as ALICE, SWEET ALICE, the film was reissued in 1981 in a shorter cut as HOLY TERROR by Dynamite Entertainment – they of the recut LEGEND OF THE SEVEN GOLDEN VAMPIRES as THE 7 BROTHERS MEET DRACULA and retitlings of SATANIC RITES OF DRACULA and FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE – to capitalize on the more recent fame of Shields with PRETTY BABY and THE BLUE LAGOON, the film fell into the public domain and hit VHS in a number of editions from the legit Allied Artist, Spotlite Video (a sublabel of NTA Entertainment), and Paragon's King of Video to the likes of United American, Goodtimes, Neon Video, and Genesis Home Video. Director Sole sought to reclaim his copyright on the film by releasing it in a five-minute shorter director's cut for the 1997 Roan Group laserdisc with a commentary by director Sole and editor Edward Salier (SILENT SCREAM) moderated by future Blue Underground president William Lustig. The cuts were restored to Anchor Bay's 1999 DVD and Hen's Tooth's 2007 DVD, both of which featured the same non-anamorphic 1.85:1 letterboxed transfer and the commentary track. In the UK, 88 Films put out a DVD in 2014 with the commentary but the anamorphic transfer was an upscale of the existing letterboxed master.

While Warner Bros. retained the original negative as part of their acquisition of the Allied Artists library, they have proven uncooperative with efforts of Sole and the likes of VCI in the United States to produce a new master (that project is currently in limbo) and are seemingly uninterested in undertaking it as a Warner Archive title. While 88 Films' all-region 1080p24 MPEG-4 AVC 1.85:1 widescreen Blu-ray is derived from a new 2K scan of 35mm positive elements is a definite improvement over everything that has come before it, it is not without its issues. Derived from a reissue print under the HOLY TERROR title, the mood-setting title sequence features a jump in the horizontal camera movement in order to move introductory Shields' credit ahead of all of the other actors. The attempt to get pure whites out of the image makes everyone seem a tad pale and brings out their pancake make-up while also perhaps washing out more minute details in walls and textures (which themselves might already have been lost with the added contrast of the positive print source). The color correction can lean a bit more towards the blue than it should even in overcast and rainy day exteriors; however, a look at the split-screen restoration demo (5:10) reveals just how badly in need of rescue the original source materials were and how greatly improved the grading and contrast is over what 88 had to work with. Nowhere on the disc apart from the menu and artwork is the more familiar ALICE, SWEET ALICE title visible, as the theatrical trailer (1:42) is the HOLY TERROR reissue one that attempts to cast Shields' as the titular menace and the TV spot (0:14) is a UK X-certificate double bill of COMMUNION and TINTORERA!