The Witch Who Came From The Sea

The Witch Who Came From The Sea (1976)

Dir. Matt Cimber

Written by Robert Thom

Starring Millie Perkins, Lonny Chapman, Vanessa Brown, Peggy Feury

            [WARNING: This one briefly talks a little about a particularly shocking sexual assault in fairly blunt terms, so feel free to skip it if that’s not for you. Or if it’s too long or it doesn’t seem like your jam or whatever. You be you, kid, don’t let me tell you how to live your life.]

            Well, I guess I’ve put this off about as long as I can. I actually watched this film relatively early in the season, but I didn’t know how to approach writing about it, and punted with some easier reviews in the hopes that civilization would collapse in the meantime and I wouldn’t get around to it. No dice, though. When you actually want Trump to just knock the whole thing down and be done with it, he can’t even deliver. Fuckin’ figures. Anyway, my point is THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA is not an easy movie to review. But as you know, I’m honor-bound to review every horror movie I watch during the October season. So here goes.

THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA is… uh. It’s a heck of a thing, all right. Maybe it’s easier to start with what it’s not. And fortunately it provides us with a pretty good example of what it’s not right up there in the poster. You see that poster, with that badass sea witch with the Bride Of Frankenstein hair who emerges from the troubled waves with her scythe of justice to behead men who trespass on her domain? Yeah, that’s not in the movie. I mean, a bearded guy does die, so I guess that part is accurate. But he dies of a heart attack and at no point does anyone get their head cut off, and also there is no witch, and if the title is referring to the main character, she also didn’t come from the sea.

            So, the first thing you’ll have to do to enjoy THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA is ignore its title and poster and everything it markets itself as, because it’s not going to be about any of that stuff. While this is clearly blatant false advertising and may well be grounds for a class-action lawsuit of some sort, in a way you can’t blame the marketing crew, because how the fuck do you try and sell this thing? I haven’t even been able to describe it yet, and I’m already 350 words in.

            It boils down to this, I guess: this movie is mostly about this young woman named Molly (Millie Perkins, THE DIARY OF ANNE FRANK [1959], NECRONOMICON) who we first encounter hanging out on the beach with her young nephews, rapturously reminiscing about her sailor father, who she claims was lost at sea when she was a child. She seems pretty nice, so it’s a bit of a surprise when she starts to space out watching two unbelievably beefy bodybuilders work out on some convenient beach-side exercise equipment (?). At first it seems like she’s perving out on them (the camera leers at their bulging junk), but then suddenly we see that she’s fantasizing about them violently dying. Huh. But I mean, we’ve all had our mind wander while fetishistically staring at the ‘roided out, glistening, straining male bodies on the beach, possibly to thoughts far more shocking. So we’re willing to give her a pass. But red flag #2 pops up when she brings her nephews back home to her down-on-her-luck sister (Vanessa Brown, THE GHOST AND MRS. MUIR), whose memories of her father are not nearly as rosy as Molly’s stories would lead one to believe. Molly does not take this difference of opinion very well. In fact, when Sis starts criticizing daddy, the normally easygoing Molly starts to seem a little bit unhinged.

            Unhinged as in, she sees a commercial featuring two football stars, and then extolls their virtue to her nephews and compares them to her father, and then has a long fantasy sequence about a weed-fueled S&M three-way with them. Except that it doesn’t play out the way you think, even assuming you’re the sort of person who has assumptions about the way something like that might go (again, thanks for reading, Grandma). They’re all nude, but it’s mostly a laid-back affair, just three naked adults (Perkins was 38 at the time) comfortably sitting around on a bed, chatting, passing a joint, making jokes. Sex is in the air only in the mildest possible way, considering the situation; in fact, if anything, there’s a weird sort of homoerotic vibe, with the two men lying naked in bed next to each other, while Molly walks around the room and occasionally kneels next to the bed to amiably converse or pass a joint. At one point, she takes each man’s hand and ties the two of them together. I’m not sure what that’s about, but everybody seems to be having a pretty good time.

            Well, at least until Molly suddenly starts talking about her dad, and then calmly gags them and cuts their dicks off with a razorblade. Major party foul. Uncool, lady.

            This all seems like it must be a fantasy, but then the next day we learn on the radio that the two footballs stars really were found dead (the radio classily doesn’t mention they were found nude in bed together). It doesn’t take a Sergei Eisenstein to piece together these two events, but exactly how they’re related is a little more hazy; Molly has her little daydream during the day (indeed, right in the middle of a conversation!), but the news report we hear places the footballers’ deaths the following evening, so, is this, like, a premonition, or does she have this fantasy and somehow manage to make it a reality by the close of that very day, or, is it just fantasy, and she kills them in some other way off-screen later that night? It’s odd enough that it almost leaves room for some ambiguity about who the killer is, but the movie never attempts to float the possibility that it’s anyone else; Molly, it seems, has been, or is becoming, a serial killer obsessed with seducing men and slicing off their dicks. And she’s not exactly a criminal mastermind about it, because before long a pair of a hard-nosed detectives (Richard Kennedy, ILSA SHE-WOLF OF THE SS, and George “Buck” Flowers, THEY LIVE, BACK TO THE FUTURE, THE AMERICAN SCREAM, also the casting director here) are on her trail.

            That trail is a curiously winding one, however. It’s never really in doubt that Molly is a killer, but she leads a pretty rich life outside this little burgeoning hobby of hers, working as a waitress at a sea-themed bar run by a good-natured old timer named “Long John” (Lonny Chapman, veteran character actor of THE BIRDS and 52 PICK-UP among many others), kickin' it with her adoring nephews, and generally seeming like she’s enjoying being an attractive, single lady knocking around in the swinging 70’s, even on the unglamorous, hardscrabble side of the tracks. This is the strangest element of THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA, and also its secret weapon: in many ways, it feels more like a freewheeling, genial softcore romp than a horror movie, except that it’s populated mainly by likable, colorful character actors and anchored by a surprisingly rich, mysterious performance from Perkins, who manages to make Molly a genuinely unique character.

About that: Perkins is not an actress I ever noticed much before, but she’s absolutely phenomenal here. She gives Molly an easy smile and a funny liveliness which make her instantly likeable, but there’s also an unmistakable sadness and vulnerability in her eyes which make her sympathetic and mysterious, and also imparts upon her a sort of live-wire unpredictability. She doesn’t seem to be entirely aware that she’s a serial killer, but she also never seems catatonic or possessed; she slides from playful flirting to a equally playful homicidal mania with a curious fluidity that deflects our ability to separate what we like about her from what we don’t. Her murders, even if she doesn’t seem to consciously remember them, are obviously a natural extension of who she is. But she doesn’t necessarily realize that, or, perhaps, she does realize it but isn’t ready to face it. It’s startlingly complex bit of characterization for what is, at least in theory, a no-budget grindhouse sex-slasher.

I’ll be damned if I can figure out how intentional any of this is, or what movie WITCH’s creators thought they were making. It’s an almost total wash as an exploitation movie, never making any apparent attempt to be scary (despite the murders), almost entirely lacking in gore (despite Molly’s eyebrow-raising killer MO), and much too sad and disturbing to be sexy (despite the liberal nudity). I was going to say it works better as a kind of low-key psycho-thriller, but even that seems iffy, given how ludicrous the psychology is and how utterly uninterested the film seems to be in thrilling. But I dunno. It has a certain simmering, dreamy hypnotic quality to it that’s compelling in a way which is hard to explain. It actually kind of reminds me of MARNIE, in its singular interest in sympathetically exploring the strange landscape of a broken woman’s mind without even the most passing interesting in actual psychological realism. Like MARNIE, the mysterious explanation for this woman’s strange behavior becomes the de facto conflict of the film, which likewise seems to be mimicking the vague outline of a thriller without ever actually becoming one.

Molly is, if anything, a more interesting character than Marnie, more subtle and conflicting and confident and lost. It’s possible that she’s so unique by virtue of being confusingly written because this movie was made by hacks on the cheap, of course. Director Matt Cimber had begun his film career with a series of softcore Mondo-style “documentaries” on sex, and followed those with a handful of blaxploitation features of little note, and would go on to direct the legendarily awful BUTTERFLY in 1982. Screenwriter Robert Thom does not exactly have a extensive track record of greatness either; he did co-write DEATH RACE 2000, which automatically grants him an irrevocable status as an American hero, but otherwise never did much which would make me wonder if he was some kind of overlooked auteur intentionally injecting a weird art film into this grindhouse cheapie. But he did have one major advantage here: he had been married to Perkins (they were apparently in the process of separating while the film was being shot). If his screenplay never quite knows what to do with this character, I am left to speculate that he may have simply succeeded by virtue of knowing what to do with his wife, and how to give her a role which would play to her strengths. As far as the production goes, it's generally cramped and undistinguished and cheap-looking, though someone was at least smart enough to get a young Dean Cundey (JURASSIC PARK, BACK TO THE FUTURE) as “associate director of photography,” (and uncredited cinematographer? IMDB and multiple other reviews seem to think so, thought based on what evidence, I don’t know). Not that you’d know it was anyone interesting from the murky, drab photography on display here.

Whatever was intended for this movie by its creators, though, Perkins makes it her own, single-handedly taking hold of the lank, unfocused narrative and dragging it along behind her until it somehow falls into some sort of mysterious order. It’s easy to imagine some vacant-eyed pretty blonde willing to take off her top for a z-grade regional grindhouse flick turning this role into something arbitrary and opaque and dull (see Hammer’s HANDS OF THE RIPPER for a perfect example). But Perkins finds little flickers of intriguing and contradictory meaning in every beat of what amounts to, at least on a basic scripted level, a haphazardly written character defined entirely by blunt childhood trauma.

Before we get to the upsetting trauma stuff, I should mention this guy is in there, and his character is named "Jack Dracula." That's not the trauma part, though, he turns out to be a real nice guy, actually. In fact, almost everyone in this movie is surprisingly nice, with one real glaring exception that we're about to get to, who's gonna ruin it for everyone. 

About that trauma: just as the movie doesn’t really ever pretend that Molly might not be a killer, it’s also pretty upfront about the fact that her father is the source of her problems. Considering the sexual nature of her crimes, her association of her victims with her father, and some queasy flashback footage of her childhood (young Molly is played by Verkina Flower, daughter of George Flower, and actress in DRIVE-IN MASSACRE and TERROR ON TOUR* before becoming a costume and wardrobe designer) with her seedy-seeming dad (John F. Goff, another veteran bit player with parts in THEY LIVE, HIT LIST, GROTESQUE and so forth) it’s pretty easy to figure out what the problem was. Obviously dear old daddy was molesting his daughter, and her suppression of this trauma is now bubbling up in some unhealthy ways.

This much is unpleasant enough, but probably inevitable for this subspecies of slasher flick, especially one made in the early 70 and featuring a female killer. But what I was certainly not expecting is that the film is going to do a lot more than hint at this unsavory prospect: SPOILER, AND ALSO, SERIOUSLY, TRIGGER WARNING, I’M TALKING NUCLEAR WARHEAD TRIGGER HERE, THERE’S NO SHAME IN TURNING BACK NOW and in fact we’re going to be subjected to a harrowing flashback of a shirtless, meaty middle-aged sailor dying of a heart attack while on top of his nine-year-old daughter. It’s not enormously explicit (the young actress is at least clothed) but it’s hardly oblique; there is blunt, candid footage of a grunting, sweating bearded guy thrusting on top of this young child, and what seems like an eternity of her struggling and panicking to get out from under the dead weight of his shuddering corpse. This is, needless to say, unbelievably, perhaps even reprehensibly, shocking stuff. I’d be willing to call it one of the single most upsetting things I’ve ever seen in a movie; --and this is me we're talking about here, the guy who watched ANGST and THE EBOLA SYNDROME and shit-- in fact, even writing about it now, weeks after the fact, it’s making me so physically upset that I had to stand up and cool off before coming back to finish this sentence. Young Verkina is surely older than she appears (she was playing adult roles a scant few years later) but even so, just subjecting a young actress to this fictional scene seems like child abuse. To make an audience endure it is hardly more justifiable.

I'm not going to include any stills of that, obviously, but any movie that would use the above font color over that background is obviously capable of anything. You've been warned.

This is all so wildly over the line that it seriously risks destabilizing the whole movie; I mean, what movie could recover from something like that? The most relentlessly grim misery porn imaginable wouldn’t dare do more than hint at such a thing, and here it is, dropped in out of the blue right at the end of this cheapie dick-slashing skin flick. If we were having any fun at all with all the sex and violence up til now (and the movie hasn’t especially been insisting that we should, but this is, after all, being sold as a genre pic) we’re certainly not anymore. Throwing something like that in doesn’t just rock the boat, it sends a tidal wave over it.

But just when it seems like the movie is going to end on something so grim it couldn’t possibly earn or support it, in rides Perkins to somehow save the day with her performance. Finally facing the truth about what has been done to her and what she has become, she defuses the potential to veer into bombastic, outrageously over-the-line camp by instead turning inward. She doesn’t weep hysterically or shout, she just sort of curls up like a dried up bug, the life draining out of her before our eyes. She wonders aloud why she would have killed those men, half sadly, half curiously, and then interrupts herself to answer her own question. She talks elliptically about being a sailor on the ocean, mutters a few seemingly nonsensical phrases that surely, in the hidden context of her brain, explain everything. She’s philosophical, languorous, but still a little mordantly funny. She knows this is the end for her; there is no discussion when a stricken-looking Long John and her maternal co-worker (Peggy Feury, ALL OF ME, 1918) start feeding her vodka and pills (as if Perkins wasn’t working hard enough, both Feury and Chapman bring an awful gravity to the scene with their shared looks of mute devastation). She must die, of course, but this is not the retributive death which would be par for the course in a serial killer film; this death is a mercy, a release from pain rather than a punishment.

That’s some pretty heavy shit to lay on a movie this rinky-dink, but fortunately, just like the main character, the movie never entirely loses its dark sense of humor or taste for eccentric character beats. That, and its ability to navigate such shocking territory and emerge relatively intact, would alone be plenty sufficient to make it a minor success. But I also think it may be trying to get at something a little more universal and relatable than this poor lady’s fucked-up life. Its attitude towards sex, for one thing, is very curious indeed. Molly is certainly sexually liberated (she even says as much at one point) and open to the point of aggressiveness about her sexual desire (the movie all but begins with her lasciviously ogling the bodybuilders, and the camera makes sure to zoom in on their stuffed thongs). But sexual empowerment is a tricky thing. She’s confident and direct, but her desire itself is anything but straightforward. She sleeps with at least one person she doesn’t try to kill, so sex is not intrinsically linked with violence to her, but I also don’t see much evidence that she finds the act of sex particularly gratifying in itself. She seems to see sexuality more in terms of power dynamics than anything else -- the one time she mentions “wanting” a man, it’s in the process of stealing him from under the nose of his startled girlfriend. At the end of the film, she slyly subverts the language of aspirational Americanism to muse, “If you don’t make it by 18 in the good ol’ USA, you just might as well forget about it. Unless you’re lucky like me; then you can make it at any age.” Just in case there was any doubt about what kind of “making” she means, she goes on: “You know how I picked up two top television football players? I said, ‘I may not be 18,’ but I can give you that ol’ time religion.'” This reminiscence seems to bring her a hint of self-satisfaction. But perhaps it’s not sex, specifically, she wants from these men; she eventually identifies them, a bit wistfully, a bit bitterly, as “men I wanted on my crew.”

There’s a logic to that, of course; poor Molly is attempting to re-take the control of her body that was taken from her as a child. But as with everything here, Perkins resists the film’s attempts to pin the character down to something as ordinary and hum-drum as a psychological symptom. If sex is a game of power for Molly, she seems to enjoy playing these games; nothing about her sexual interactions suggests she’s hesitant or unwilling or even conflicted. They do, however, all but scream that something isn’t quite right, which says a lot about the men who end up butchered by her. As cinema would later prove with the real-life footage from 2013’s UNDER THE SKIN, men are able to overlook a lot of warning signs when there’s sex involved. They’re not exactly bad guys -- Molly, at the end, pleads, “doesn’t it matter that I didn’t hate any of them?” -- but their flaw is that they’re too self-absorbed to see what’s in front of their eyes. Molly is not exactly subtle that something is terribly off, but they’re too busy sizing her up as a sex object to pay any attention to what she’s telling them. In a way, they’re using her for their own pleasure just as surely as her father did; consensually, to be sure, but perhaps not much less dehumanizing. By contrast, Long John, who also sleeps with her but clearly cares about her as a person (even if he doesn’t understand her) is never in danger. If the film has any claim to a subtle feminist critique, it’s in that possible reading.

Mostly, though, Molly’s problem isn’t with men, it’s with reality itself. The root of her problem seems to come as much from her refusal to acknowledge what happened to her as from the actual trauma. And living in the superficial, media-saturated 70’s hasn’t helped her any; unmoored from the fundamental reality of her own suffering, she clings to the manufactured reality of television as a source of stability. She consistently calls the unfortunate sportsmen “television football players,” for example; the reality of their existence as real-life football players is completely irrelevant to her. No surprise, then, that she gravitates towards TV personalities, including one who captures her attention with their shared enthusiasm for razor blades. This is the one point the script gets a little pushy about; “turn on your television set. Find out what’s happening in the real world,” a detective advises a clueless minor victim who doesn’t realize the danger he’s narrowly missed. Confronted with her murders, Molly is doubtful they happened unless she sees it on TV. “You don’t know if it’s true or not unless it’s on television,” she says, with an unusual burst of irritation. As it finally dawns on her that it’s true, she kicks over the TV in frustration, as if trying to switch off the unpleasant reality of her situation with the darkened image.

It’s almost quaint by 2018 to imagine the 70s as a time of overwhelming media mind-control, of course (jeez, if these people can’t handle watching a tiny TV in the corner of a noisy bar, imagine what twitter would do to them!). That we’ve progressed so horrifying far in this very direction ought to make the movie feel more relevant than ever, but at least for my palette, the specifics here are too dated to make for an easy emotional connection. But fortunately, the movie’s metaphysical musing extend beyond a simple media critique; Molly’s retreat from reality has been so complete that there can be no return. Even in death, she turns to fantasy: as she slips away, she sees herself sailing the open seas, and the credits roll over that image, leaving us stranded out of reality with her. Freedom, for her, is a release from reality, not a return to it. That she drags us along with her is an ambiguous end to a film which proves consistently more nebulous and slippery than its humble production would suggest. But at least for Molly, a happy ending is being lost at sea; still lost, to be sure, but at least in a world of her own making.

So really I guess my point is this movie should be called THE WITCH WHO RETURNS TO THE SEA. But maybe that sounds too much like a sequel. Anyway, this one is pretty chintzy in a lot of ways, and certainly not a lot of fun, but for fans of hazy, druggy, despairing little character studies with a few scenes of absolutely shocking depravity, this is a pretty good one. Having typed all that out, I guess I can kinda see why it didn’t exactly take America by storm, but for the few people who would enjoy something like that, this is a real find, and has really lingered with me, although not altogether in ways that I have enjoyed.

                                                                        FIN

*In which she’s credited as “well-endowed lady” a horrifying four years after playing a nine-year-old here.

CHAINSAWNUKAH 2018 CHECKLIST!

Searching For Bloody Pictures

TAGLINE	Molly Really Knows How To Cut Men Down To Size, which in the poster suggests beheading. But we all know better now.
TITLE ACCURACY	Absolutely one of the most blatantly inaccurate titles I’ve ever encountered.
LITERARY ADAPTATION?	No
SEQUEL?	None
REMAKE?	None
COUNTRY OF ORIGIN	USA
HORROR SUB-GENRE	Slasher, maybe, in the vaguest sense. “horror-of-personality”
SLUMMING A-LISTER?	None
BELOVED HORROR ICON?	None
NUDITY?	Lots
SEXUAL ASSAULT?	Yes, an especially horrible one.
WHEN ANIMALS ATTACK!	No
GHOST/ ZOMBIE / HAUNTED BUILDING?	No
POSSESSION?	No
CREEPY DOLLS?	No
EVIL CULT?	None.
MADNESS?	Yeah, you could say that.
TRANSMOGRIFICATION?	None, although Molly gets a tattoo.
VOYEURISM?	Hmmm, I don’t think so, now that you mention it.
MORAL OF THE STORY	Oh boy, where to begin. I guess, don’t rape your kids, would be a pretty good starting point. That too much to ask? Jesus fucking Christ, world.