Alyce kills. Indeed, the titular, seemingly innocent twenty-something does eventually get around to that messy and socially precarious past-time. Before that Alyce also frets about her banal call-center job, stays up morbidly absorbing every program she can find on the war in the Middle East and spends most of her time in a self-important haze of mediocrity only briefly lifted when hanging with her BFF Carroll. In point of fact, Alyce was a pill long before she started offing people, which is at least part of the fun of Jay Lee’s droll, little horror thriller Alyce Kills.
Drawing from as many psychologically dysfunctional protagonists as you could care to mention, Jade Dornfield’s Alyce is the angsty, mentally detoriating center of Lee’s film; a girl who seems like a Carrie White on the outside, but whose special blend of madness is rooted so deep it’s hard to imagine a time when she wasn’t headed on this trajectory. What finally sparks this downward spiral into homicidal behavior is a drug-fueld bitching session atop Alyce’s apartment roof that gives way to tragedy; Carroll (Tamara Feldman) is accidentally (or maybe intentionally) pushed by an out-of-her-head Alyce and plummets to her supposed doom. In a miraculous stroke, Carroll doesn’t die, although she comes out of the acccident grotesquely disfigured. The guilt and uncertainty tearing through Alyce’s psyche finally fracture it completely, leaving Dornfield to gleefully embody her descent into a dark rabbit-hole of drugs, alcohol and eventually psychotic behavior.
Alyce Kills is never half as clever as it thinks it is, but there’s a bit more going on here than your usual hack-and-slash, with some acerbic wit and textured character development scattered throughout the script. Jay Lee, responsible for Zombie Strippers, has graduated to a slightly more mature class (how could he not?) with this twisted take on Lewis Carroll’s nonsensical children’s fantasy. Of course, Lee mercifully spares us an actual adaptation and instead uses the inspiration of Wonderland and its illogical conceits as fevered context for Alyce’s mad, mad misadventures. The film is well paced for its ninety minutes, saving the craziest and most memorable passages for the close, ensuring that it never wears out its welcome. The gory kills are surprisingly inventive and absurdly staged, retaining a certain off-kilter realism befitting Dornfield’s fiercely odd performance. Alyce isn’t a big girl, but she’s feisty and her victims don’t go down without a fight, which adds jet-black humor to their struggles for survival; struggles that often end with knives protruding from their chest, or their bodies being hacked apart for clever disposal in the kitchen.
Despite stylish direction and expert staging of the more brutal moments, Lee lets Alyce get away from him as sure as his protagonist’s sanity gets away from her. This isn’t the first genre film of the season to get caught in the death-spiral of psychedelic, over-produced mind-trips but it’s one of the few that survives thanks to the titilating work of its lead, who bravely engages in every subterranean nightmare the director plans for her. Sherri Moon Zombie can keep her racoon eyes and gnarly dreadlocks; I’ll take Dornfield’s cracked faux-innocence and chipper insanity over the latter’s glum misery any day. The rest of Alyce almost works as a toothy modern satire, a kind of Eating Raoul for a moody slacker culture engrossed in second-hand violence. Unfortunately, Lee’s ambition doesn’t always meet his execution, which applies loving detail to the practical make-up effects but never has the same disciplined handle on the tone and plot, which vassilate wildly as things gets more and more bat-shit crazy. Most horror fans who arrive at Alyce’s inevitable conclusion won’t care as much about such missteps, and will leave making a note to look out for more of Lee and Dornfield.
Alyce Kills is now in limited release.