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The acute intro—scored to an ominous liturgy, a veiled figure raises a crucifix like a dagger—establishes an off-kilter widescreen, the pun is the Sacred Heart can be bloody as hell. New Jersey in the Kennedy years is the fractured terrain, one decade's family melodrama as another's comic horror. Two sisters, anxiously saccharine (Brooke Shields) and malevolently bratty (Paula E. Sheppard), mother (Linda Miller) dotes on the former so the moppet is strangled and torched during her first communion. "Strong indications of a schizoid personality" is the diagnosis for the hellion, she keeps a shrine in the basement with dolls and roaches, at the bottom lurks murder or merely menstrual adolescence. The local padre barely holding the community together (Rudolph Willrich) and the estranged husband who plays detective (Niles McMaster), feeble fathers lost in the ferocious feminine maelstrom. "We're not even safe in church anymore!" Psycho playing at the local theater is but the most pronounced of Alfred Sole's Hitchcockisms, his viciously fraught frames showcase the Catholic boy's eye for disfiguring guilt and sacrament. (A note from Roeg's Don't Look Now has the child's plastic façade lifted for a glimpse of the hairy goblin.) Every image is more ornate than expected: A low-angled camera gazing past looming statuary to find the imp sticking out her tongue for the holy purification that never comes, an overhead view of the sidewalk as a gory puddle dissolves under rainwater, the mountainous landlord (Alphonso DeNoble) in his den surrounded by cats and show tunes. "Great faith" in wicked expressionism is a rare gift, Collet-Serra's Orphan inherits it gladly. With Mildred Clinton, Jane Lowry, Michael Hardstark, Gary Allen, Tom Signorelli, and Lillian Roth.
--- Fernando F. Croce |