Impressive and coherent "video nasty" from the 1970's which is well worth a watch today. Sleazy and subversive but with a strong feminist undertone: the men in this movie are either matinee idols, muscle-bound hunks or weirdly trippy outsiders. Great exposition of the myths and power of the sea. The incest theme is well introduced and explored. The scene which explains "the witch who came from the sea" is also pertinent and profound.(It is so refreshing to me that Mary Whitehouse and the moral outrage of the 1980's did not in fact kill off such hidden gems).Not as savage as the likes of "I Spit on your Grave" or other female retribution flicks of its ilk, but with infinitely deeper emotional resonance.Pour a shot of rum and gaze out over the water... but watch out for the witch!

In California, Molly (Millie Perkins ) is a deranged woman that babysits her nephews while her sister works hard sewing clothes for her clients. Molly works as waitress in a restaurant in the night shift and is the lover of the owner. She has fantasies with other handsome men. But Molly has also recollections of her childhood, when she was sexually abused by her father. Her insanity leads her to a murderous crime spree against men. "The Witch Who Came from the Sea" is a weird, amateurish and senseless B-movie with a poor combination of slasher and exploitation. The screenplay is a complete mess and the situations are absolutely strangers without explanation. The United Kingdom Department of Public Prosecutions included "The Witch Who Came from the Sea" in a list of "video nasties". In Brazil, this film was recently released on DVD with wonderful art work but low quality of image and sound. It is worthwhile watching it only to satisfy the curiosity... and then forget it. My vote is two.Title (Brazil): "A Bruxa que Veio do Mar" ("The Witch Who Came from the Sea")

Molly (Millie Perkins) is a girl who is haunted by a childhood of sexual abuse at the hands of her now dead father. These images are however, repressed by her, and she constructs a fantasy world where he did in fact die at sea - as he was an explorer of the sea. This we later find out is drawn from the euphemistic term Molly's father used to describe the abuse: "Molly, lets get lost at sea".This fantasy that Molly creates is also perpetuated in sequences that almost appear as if they are happening only in her broken mind. After seeing a couple of professional footballers on the TV (she describes them - and other men - as beautiful creatures to her two nephews), she seems to drift into a day-dream in which she ties the two up to a bed, in a pre-empted plan for sexual endeavour, but she proceeds to cut the penis off of one with a razor blade. As we later discover, these two footballers actually died. Whilst we are certain as an audience that Molly surely did this act, we seem to have no hard evidence of this. Is Molly simply imagining this?The film is punctuated with short, and increasingly graphic depictions of Molly's rape as a child by her father. These haunting sequences are exacerbated by the increasing volume and amount of perpetual seagull noises filtered through an echo effect. As these moments become more frequent, we find out that Molly's father died of a heart attack during an attack on her. So in Molly's own mind, as her father died during this act - an act he has a euphemistic phrase for - did indeed die at sea.Molly floats somnambulistically through the majority of this film. She seems almost not to be aware of the events that she is involved in. We seem to follow this path too. But we are also aware of her increasing breakdown. She becomes more erratic and confused about the people around her. She seems obsessed with television, and its ability to display the most beautiful people.This is no masterpiece, not by a long shot. But it is an interesting piece of cinema. Director Matt Cimber (who has made no other work of significance) unfolds the rapid mental breakdown with a little bit of style. The production values aren't the best, but they are suitable for the content. I did enjoy its mix of seeming supernatural and grindhouse- style elements. It almost plays like a lost and degraded artifact of horror/art-house cinema.This film bizarrely made it onto the UK's video nasties list (or at least the DPP list), where I can only assume was clustered with the more horrific films (such as 1972's Last House on the Left, 1977's I Spit on Your Grave) due to it's quite intense, but never graphic depictions of male castration.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

When I decided to watch THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA, I was expecting some sort of groovy 1970s exploitation kinda film. It looked promising during the beginning: we see a woman on the beach who daydreams about killing the three big muscular guys who are exercising nearby. That moment was filled with gratuitous sexualized violence (the bulging guys are nearly naked). Cool! Then as the film went along, the by-now-crazy woman actually kills two football players by castrating them. Not a pleasant thing to watch but I'm up for some cheap thrills. But after that, there's almost nothing. It's just talk, talk, talk. The castration scene was pretty good. The build-up at least. But once the woman started "operating" on the men, the result was underwhelming. Everything was done off-screen (like the Japanese film, AUDITION) and what little gore there was, if wasn't convincing at all. Not that I wanted to see all the gory details but the result was not very convincing. Practically everything in this movie was done off-screen, including the movie itself. Seriously, there's no story, there's no semblance of terror or horror. The psychology is silly. The flashback scenes between the father and the daughter were funny but oddly effective (and the reason why this film was considered a "nasty" by the British film board). The actors were good but the script is such a mess or it doesn't know what to do with this crazy character that no amount of good acting could have saved this. It's meant to be seen as a whimsical (yes, whimsical!) psychological portrait of a crazy woman but the film itself comes off looking completely drunk. There's no structure to it whatsoever. It ambulates forward without any purpose. To titillate? To enlightened? To shock? To make us laugh? Nope. None of that.The most disappointing thing about THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA is that it promises to be trashy and, mainly because in which decade this was made, it would be chock full of gratuitous nudity. Nope. Aside from a few shots of the lead actress' breasts and a few quick shots of some naked people not worth mentioning, there's NO nudity to be seen, female or male. It's odd that for a film about castration, we never get to see what the crazy woman was so obsessed about those men. It's a film that basically pleases no one: fans of trashy films or fans of quirky and original alternative films.