R.I.P. Alfred Sole, director of Alice, Sweet Alice, has passed away at 78

We have some sad news to report this afternoon, as genre filmmaker Dante Tomaselli announced that his cousin Alfred Sole, the director of the 1976 horror classic Alice, Sweet Alice (watch it HERE) has unexpectedly passed away at the age of 78.

Born on July 2, 1943, in Paterson, New Jersey, Sole was a movie fan from a very early age. He attended the University of Florence in Italy – at first intending to become a painter, but then switching over to earn a degree in architecture. While working as an architect, he dreamed of becoming a filmmaker, and he started to make that dream come true in the early 1970s. When an investor told him he’d give him the money to make the Western he wanted to direct if he shot an X-rated movie first, Sole made good on his side of the bargain. Unfortunately, his X-rated movie Deep Sleep was pulled from theatres, all prints were confiscated, and he faced a prison sentence on obscenity charges. So that was a mess and the Western didn’t get made. Sole rebounded with Alice, Sweet Alice (a.k.a. Communion, Holy Terror, The Mask Murders, etc.)

Written by Sole and his neighbor Rosemary Ritvo, Alice, Sweet Alice tells the following story:

Favorite daughter Karen (Brooke Shields) is viciously strangled and set afire in church on the day of her First Communion, and suspicion falls on her jealous and emotionally unstable sister, Alice (Paula E. Sheppard). When the girls’ aunt, Annie (Jane Lowry), is later stabbed on an apartment complex stairway, Alice is sent away. But the attacks continue, prompting priest Father Tom (Rudolph Willrich) and Alice’s dad, Dominick (Niles McMaster), to go in search of the real killer.

Sadly, Sole didn’t have a prolific directing career after that. He directed the 1980 cult film Tanya’s Island, which paired Vanity with an ape created by Rob Bottin, and the 1982 slasher parody Pandemonium, which was originally titled Thursday the 12th (and was a childhood favorite of mine, thanks to its showings on cable stations). That was it for his days of directing features, but he did team up with the Groundlings comedy troupe to co-direct a TV movie called Cheeseball Presents. As Sole said,

I was not good for Hollywood and Hollywood was not good for me. I didn’t understand the politics. I was just this guy from Jersey who made movies. You go to these meetings with these hotshot executives for hours and nothing gets done! It was just constant frustration. What I really should’ve done is stayed in Paterson and made movies with friends in my hometown, the way I started out, like John Waters or George A. Romero.”

He was offered the chance to make a sequel to Alice, Sweet Alice, but wasn’t interested. What he wanted to see was a remake that would allow for a new draft of the original script, and Tomaselli had been working to make that happen.

After leaving directing behind, Sole found his greatest success as a production designer, working in that capacity on forty different titles over the last twenty-eight years, including Halloweentown, Wishmaster 2, Veronica Mars, Moonlight, Castle, and MacGyver.

Our sincere condolences go out to Sole’s family, friends, and fans.