ALYCE KILLS

Thirtysomething friends Alyce and Carroll spend a night out that takes them to a nightclub where Carroll discovers her boyfriend is cheating on her. Stunned by alcohol and furious, the woman decides to drown her sorrows in heroin and involves her friend Alyce as well. The two, completely out of control, go up to the roof of the building where Alyce lives and accidentally Carroll falls already, remaining seriously injured. Alyce, who believes her to be dead, decides not to tell anyone that she was also on the roof that night and lies to the police, but when she learns that her friend is still alive and might soon be able to talk despite her broken jaw, she begins to fall into a whirlwind of paranoia that leads her to make increasingly massive use of drugs, with terrible consequences for her and those around her. Frustration, addiction, loss of control, revenge. This is the path that the protagonist of this thriller/splatter follows in the barely hour and a half of duration, in which an evident imbalance is noted between a redundant and uninteresting first part and a second that is a real splatter delirium. Watching "Alyce" one understands in a rather clear way the intentions and the path that led director and screenwriter Jay Lee to the creation of the film. Lee, who alternates his activity in TV, music, and horror cinema with a resume that includes the funny trash with Jenna Jameson "Zombie Strippers!", has a brilliant idea for "Alyce": to show how far the repressed aggression of a seemingly meek and unattractive woman, trapped in an ordinary and boring life, harassed by canonical episodes of bullying involving employers, landlords, and male representatives. This is the not very original, nor brilliant, concept on which the author is based, but it is obvious that Lee built the 90 minutes of his film exclusively on the last quarter of an hour; that is, it is as if he had a clear idea in his head of how to end his film, but not how to undertake and build the path that would lead to it. And indeed, the film approaches the subject a bit too broadly, with disconnected events that should show us the psychological path leading the protagonist to madness, but which do not make much logical sense, are repetitive, with actions of the woman often stupid and unmotivated that do not make the protagonist's psychological path credible at all. And this time we are not talking about pure entertainment where it is forced to find content, because it is clear that Lee wanted to build something that went beyond the simple B-movie for splatter fans, only he did not succeed and gave the best of himself at the moment when he must throw in the face of the spectator scraps and amputated limbs. If in most cases Alyce is described as the classic water and soap woman who would like redemption from a life that has not been particularly generous with her, resulting a bit banal and yet very standardized, in others there are interesting glimpses of character that would have been curious to explore. Between Alyce and Carroll, a certain sexual feeling is hinted at that might suggest the protagonist's bisexuality, but this element introduced at the beginning of the film is then completely abandoned, as are the relationships of love/hate/friendship between the other characters and the protagonist described with too much approximation, starting with James Duval of "Donnie Darko", who here plays Vince, Carroll's ex-boyfriend. Instead, the director insists too much, even too much, on Alyce's process of becoming a new addict, which appears quite unmotivated and superficial if the intention was to provide a justification for the woman's progressive madness. As mentioned, the best part of the film is the epilogue, where Alyce, now completely out of control, carries out a series of bloody revenge acts. Mostly without a real reason, but Alyce's vengeful fury offers some truly strong and delirious moments, reaching peaks of extreme violence surely remarkable for splatter fans. An honorable mention to the lead actress Jade Dornfeld, who despite having to embody a poorly written character, is convincing and really very good, carrying on her frail shoulders all the weight of a somewhat too schizophrenic film. "Alyce" will surely strike for its ultra-violent epilogue, but the fundamental psychological component leaves a lot to be desired. In Italian DVD from One Movie and 01 Distribution.