DIFF ’03: What Alice Found

½*/****
written and directed by A. Dean Bell

by Walter Chaw Petty to fixate on such things, but what to make of a heavy Boston accent that appears and disappears so randomly (in a character from New Hampshire, for God's sake) that it causes one to wonder why they even bothered in the first place? The performances in the digital cheapie What Alice Found are uniformly awful, but Emily Grace as titular trailer-park refugee Alice is a special case, trembling between Tori Spelling and Melanie Hutsell's SNL impersonation of Tori Spelling–all zombie stares, eye-rolling, and lop-sided sneers. Out of the park and into the mobile home, Alice finds herself through the looking glass, as it were, travelling with a kindly lot lizard (Judith Ivey) selling her wares at the rest stops of the Eastern Seaboard. Not long before Alice decides to hustle a little cheesecake herself, the picture is wall-to-wall with acoustic girl-folk meant, I guess, to inject some pathos and irony where there is none. Credit due for its decidedly unglamorous look at sex for hire (recalling Lizzie Borden's Working Girls in that respect), and for including a nice Beth Orton tune, What Alice Found–heavy with self-importance and dolphin symbolism–is a grim little ditty more unintentionally hilarious than thought-provoking, more cheap thriller than social exposé.