Movies
‘Alice, Sweet Alice’ Director Alfred Sole Has Passed Away at 78
An early proto-slasher horror movie, 1976’s Alice, Sweet Alice was written & directed by Alfred Sole, and we’ve learned the sad news this week that the filmmaker has passed away.
Alice, Sweet Alice notably marked the feature debut of a young Brooke Shields, and it was Alfred Sole’s second feature as director. In Alice, Sweet Alice, “A divorced Catholic couple’s life is turned upside down when one of their two adolescent daughters is suspected of her younger sister’s brutal murder during her first holy communion and a series of subsequent stabbings.”
Alfred Sole had directed 1972’s Deep Sleep prior to making his mark on the horror genre with Alice, Sweet Alice, with subsequent films on his resume including 1980’s Tanya’s Island, 1982’s comedy-horror spoof Pandemonium, and 1984’s TV movie Cheeseball Presents.
Alfred Sole also wrote two episodes of Paramount’s “Friday the 13th: The Series” back in the 1980s, as well as one episode of “Alfred Hitchcock Presents” in the same decade. As a production designer, Sole worked on films including Halloweentown, Wishmaster 2: Evil Never Dies, Halloweentown High, and S. Darko, and most recently the “MacGyver” TV reboot.
Horror filmmaker Dante Tomaselli, Sole’s cousin, wrote on Facebook this week, “It is with great sadness, I announce the loss of my beloved cousin, Alfred Sole. Just this morning I sent Alfred an email excitedly sharing the progress of my upcoming film project and we were set to speak on the phone today! I’m devastated.”
Alfred Sole was 78 years old.
Universal has been having a hell of a time getting their Universal Monsters brand back on a better path in the wake of the Dark Universe collapsing, with four movies thus far released in the years since The Mummy attempted to get that interconnected universe off the ground.
First was Leigh Whannell’s The Invisible Man, to date the only post-Mummy hit for the Universal Monsters, followed by The Last Voyage of the Demeter, Renfield, and now Abigail. The latter three films have attempted to bring Dracula back to the screen in fresh ways, but both Demeter and Renfield severely underperformed at the box office. And while Abigail is a far better vampire movie than those two, it’s unfortunately also struggling to turn a profit.
Where does the Universal Monsters brand go from here? The good news is that Universal and Blumhouse have once again enlisted the help of Leigh Whannell for their upcoming Wolf Man reboot, which is howling its way into theaters in January 2025. This is good news, of course, because Whannell’s Invisible Man was the best – and certainly most profitable – of the post-Dark Universe movies that Universal has been able to conjure up. The film ended its worldwide run with $144 million back in 2020, a massive win considering the $7 million budget.
Given the film was such a success, you may wondering why The Invisible Man 2 hasn’t come along in these past four years. But the wait for that sequel may be coming to an end.
Speaking with the Happy Sad Confused podcast this week, The Invisible Man star Elisabeth Moss notes that she feels “very good” about the sequel’s development at this point in time.
“Blumhouse and my production company [Love & Squalor Pictures]… we are closer than we have ever been to cracking it,” Moss updates this week. “And I feel very good about it.”
She adds, “We are very much intent on continuing that story.”
At the end of the 2020 movie, Elisabeth Moss’s heroine Cecilia Kass uses her stalker’s high-tech invisibility suit to kill him, now in possession of the technology that ruined her life.
Stay tuned for more on The Invisible Man 2 as we learn it.
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