Alice Sweet Alice (1976)

Directed by Alfred Sole
My rating: 2 stars out of 4
IMDb
(DVD, Hen's Tooth Video)

The movie tries hard, too hard, to imitate its obvious influences: Hitchcock and to a lesser extent De Palma (himself a Hitchcock derivative). The movie is filled with screaming, hysterical women and children, which is not scary but irritating. In fact there is a definite feminine theme here, although I'm not sure it was intentional. There was no way you could guess the killer unless you were lucky (I guessed the young priest, wrong). I also suspected there might be more than one killer, which was implied by the ending. It's a well made film, just too derivative, and perhaps a bit pretentious. I spotted a Psycho poster in a train station.