"Alyce Kills" - - American Sucko

"Alyce Kills" can't decide what type of film it wants to be. It starts off with a vague riff on "Alice In Wonderland" with talk of rabbit holes, "eat me, drink me" jokes, and, of course, the fact that the main character's name is Alyce. And her best friend is named Carrol Lewis. Get it? Well, apparently the filmmakers didn't because this thread is pretty much dropped halfway through the movie.

The rest of the film is split into two distinct parts: the first hour is about Alyce feeling guilty for pushing her friend, the aforementioned Carrol, off of a roof. She had a weird obsession with Carrol and is called a "Single White Female" in reference to the movie about crazy roommates. At first they play up a slight lesbian angle but that is also dropped until the part where Alyce attempts to masturbate Carrol's corpse at a funeral parlour in front of everyone.

Yeah, it's one of those movies.

The movie starts off with Alyce already pretty messed up in the head, so her descent into madness seems more like an inevitably whether or not she tried to kill Carrol. It makes the whole thing oddly pointless. Why watch a movie about a crazy person getting crazier? Where's the character arc in that?

Along her descent she meets various people who wrong her, including a co-worker, bitchy girls, misogynistic men, and a verbose drug dealer who is actually the highlight of the film. Eddie Rouse's performance as Rex has a "Breaking Bad" quality to it, and his speeches on morality and society may be a little on-the-nose but they are far more subtle than most of the film.

The last twenty or so minutes takes a wild turn for the worse and becomes slapstick comedy as Alyce fingerbangs a corpse, masturbates to war footage, picks at a guy's back acne (gross), stabs Carrol's ex-boyfriend until his guts comically spill out like a piñata, then cuts his arm off, puts it in the microwave, throws it in a blender, and finally somehow disposes of his whole body piece by piece in a garbage disposal. I've seen garbage disposals stop working after a picnic but somehow a 180 lb man, bones included, prove no match for a standard apartment sink disposal.

Alyce wanders around town with a bloody baseball bat and a hacksaw wreaking vengeance on her enemies and as awesome as that might sound it literally is the last few scenes of an already ponderous film. Before we get to the part that the title promises we have to watch an hour of Alyce wiggling around on the floor and getting fired from her job.

The film could have worked much better if they went in one direction and stuck with it. They could have focused on the descent, from sane to insane instead of insane to insaner, and played up the "Alice In Wonderland" motif (the drug dealer being the white rabbit leading her further down the hole) until she ends up transformed. They could have gone for straight character study about guilt and loss, although that would have been pretty boring because, let's face it, the parts they tried doing that in this movie were the worse. But hoping from themes of loss to a protracted scene of smashing a dead man's rib cage with an oversized baseball bat doesn't work. It tries to have it both ways, serious and dark humor, and the shift is so abrupt I spent the last ten minutes saying "What!?" out loud in disbelief.

I've seen online people compare this to "Dexter" but it in no way comes close to anything that stellar show has ever done. The descent into madness can be an interesting narrative, but when the slippery slope of vengeance becomes as compelling as a slide at Chuck E. Cheese, you can't do anything other than laugh.