Caffeinated Clint
Nothing to do with Wonderland, a Mad Hatter or Rabbit Holes
The newly-crowned King of horror, Dante Tomaselli (“Desecration”, “The Ocean”), will direct a remake – yep, Hollywood’s still got a woody for those things – of Alfred Sole’s 1976 slasher film “Alice Sweet Alice”.
From the sounds of it, this redo mightn’t be dead on arrival either – if only because the captain of the new tug loathes the sloppy remake trend of the noughties.
“These new remakes look way too light and modern with the cotton candy casting…CGI silliness,” Tomaselli tells The Underground Horror Movie Network. “They look like fucking television commercials! Soon all of our favorites will be zapped out, every last one. So Alfred and I thought with Alice, Sweet Alice, we just want to beat everybody to the punch.”
The original film, released in 1976, went a little like this : After a young girl is brutally murdered during her first communion, her strange and withdrawn older sister becomes the main suspect. Linda Miller and a very-young Brooke Shields were among the cast.
Needless to say, Tomaselli hopes to make a buck out of the movie, but his motives for the remake are aren’t purely initiated by cabbage.
Tomaselli’s main reason is “Because Alfred asked me to remake it and I love Alice, Sweet Alice with all my heart and soul. It’s etched in my psyche; I grew up on the film.”
“I would be very proud and happy to see Dante direct the movie,” says Sole. “I think he is very talented and I’m so proud of him. To think my movie made him want to become a film director… that’s quite an accomplishment, I would say.”
“I said, ‘Alfred you should direct it’,” says Tomaselli. “But he doesn’t want to. I know for sure many people would love to see him direct a film again, and hopefully we will see him in that role again. He genuinely loves being a Production Designer, and he’s extremely successful at it. Right now he’s the Production Designer on Veronica Mars.”
“Alice, Sweet Alice is a film that is really about evil passed on from generation to generation, so he thinks it makes sense for me to remake it, a kind of passing on of the torch…or the knife,” laughs Tomaselli. “There’s something so elusive and multi-layered about Alice, Sweet Alice. It’s a textural film, very disorienting, very enigmatic… it’s a trippy, disorienting ride that has atmosphere galore. At the center, there’s a family drama. It’s like a Giallo, one of those Italian murder puzzles. You’ll have no idea where it’s taking you and won’t really know until the final frame. Even at that point you’ll probably be perplexed! Also, the masked killer ranks as one of the creepiest in horror history. That chilling mask! I wouldn’t want it to lose that mysteriousness. It’s also a genuinely creepy film with spine-tingling music, so I’d have a lot to live up to, definitely.”
Tomaselli would also like the new version to have a couple of connections to the original – including having the babe from the Blue Lagoon make an appearance.
“We know we’d like to have Brooke Shields in at least cameo” insists Tomaselli.
