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The Witch Who Came From the Sea, 1976. Directed
by Matt Cimber. Millie Perkins, Lonny Chapman, Vanessa Brown, George "Buck"
Flowers, Richard Kennedy.
The packaging of Subversive Cinema's newest
reclamation from the exploitation back closet, shown below, would lead
you to believe that The Witch Who Came from the Sea is a fantasy
horror movie in which a beautiful witch comes ashore to decapitate men
(the art, enlarged for the front of the DVD cover to omit the severed
head in the witch's left hand, is reproduced in all its glory on the
DVD menu).
The poster painting is an excellent faux-Frazetta
that would be ideal for such a film. The title of the film itself suggests
that there is a witch involved with the movie. But as was the case with
many a seventies-era exploitation film, the promo material lies its
head off. Not only isn't this a fantasy horror film, not only are there
no decapitations, there's not even a witch in the film.
So what IS this movie?
The plot concerns, Molly, a single woman who is obsessed with television
celebrity and is beset by visions of ghastly violence committed against
the personalities she sees on TV. She is first seen regaling her nephews
with tales of her sea-captain father, vanished for many years. But even
in this idyll, the film shows us cracks in her psyche. There is a pair
of bodybuilders on the beach; she imagines them killed by the equipment
with which they are exercising. Later in the film, she imagines a scenario
in which she seduces two famous football players, ties them up, and castrates
them with a safety razor. When the news report the next day notes the
sex murder of the football players of her fantasies, it's clear that Molly's
fantasies are more than just fantasies.
Later, at a party hosted by a television star, Botticelli's The Birth
of Venus stirs repressed memories of incest, committed by the father
she romanticizes as a brave sea captain lost at sea. Venus, the television
actor tells her, is a witch born when a god's testicles were cut off and
cast into the sea. Is this the witch from the sea described in the title
of the film? Possibly, though the filmmakers offer another interpretation.
Molly is also obsessed with a mermaid tattoo, so much so that she has
it inked onto her abdomen. (Mind you, this film was made in the 1970s,
before body modification chic brought tattoos into the mainstream.). Molly
begins to unravel at this point, embarking on a fatal affair with an actor
from a razor commercial, and arousing the suspicions of her friends and
the police...
The ancillary material provided with this disc notes
that The Witch Who Came from the Sea was threatened with an "X"
rating when it was first submitted. It's not hard to see why. While the
castration scene itself is plenty nasty, the flashbacks to incest--particularly
the LAST flashback--are well beyond even the permissive standards of the
1970s. And yet, in spite of the transgressive nature of the material,
this film still manages to seem relatively mundane.
The biggest "name" associated with the production is cinematographer
Dean Cundey, who three years later would lend his prowling panavision
eye to John Carpenter's Halloween and who would eventually wind
up filming Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and Jurassic Park. Cundey
is erroneously credited as this film's "Director of Photography"
by Subversive's DVD case. The film itself credits Ken Gibb, who also photographed
director Matt Cimber's Candy Tangerine Man, while listing Cundey
as the assistant DP. Cundey oversaw the transfer for Subversive, so maybe
bumping his credit is their way of saying thanks, but I would resist taking
credit for this film were I in his place. The shot compositions are functional
at best here, though the opening shot of an abandoned seashore recalls
a (much better) shot Cundey executed for Carpenter's The Fog. Still
and all, Cundey's name is signed to less reputable films than this one;
he was the DP for Ilsa: Harem Keeper of the Oil Sheiks, after all...
The screenplay for this movie was written by Robert Thom, whose other
credits include two deliriously weird films in Wild In the Streets
and Deathrace 2000. Thom was married to star Millie Perkins at
the time, so his screenplay for THIS movie is a vanity project. Like most
vanity projects, it indulges its star. Perkins isn't much of an actress,
though she is particularly good at seeming drugged out or hung over. Thom's
screenplay is cast in the mode of the seventies era "hysterical feminist
crack-up" movie, a genre descended from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's
"The Yellow Wallpaper" down through films like The Haunting,
Let's Scare Jessica To Death, and Images. The downside of
this particular subgenre is that it requires a much better lead actress
than Millie Perkins to pull it off (Perkins is certainly no Julie Harris
or Susannah York). And the actors surrounding Perkins aren't her equal,
which hurts. But then, maybe I'm being too hard on the actors. Director
Matt Cimber and his film editor, Bud Warner, have left them adrift in
a film that has too much "air" in its scenes. The movie has
a number of potentially explosive exploitation scenes. It certainly has
a fair amount of skin, in addition to Molly's violent fantasies. One of
the scenes in the movie, in which a television commercial bleeds into
Molly's fantasy life, seems to anticipate some of the epistemology of
Cronenberg's Videodrome. Unfortunately,
Cimber fails to construct a suitable framework on which to mount them.
As a result, you get a case of "bad movie time," in which time
dilates inexplicably and makes the experience of watching the film seem
longer than it is.
If the film has any value, it is as a cultural document. It would be easy
to point out the fashion horrors of the seventies, whether they are provided
by the clothes or by the decor (there are plenty of wood panelled walls
here). But beyond that, The Witch Who Came from the Sea presents
a snapshot of a culture of pill popping, celebrity worship, and easy sex
that no longer exists (this was the era of the Quaalude, now consigned
to the dustbin of history). To an extent, these elements form a tapestry
around the central horrors of castrating feminist rage and incest, providing
them with context. I doubt seriously that this was intended by the filmmakers,
who have unintentionally captured what they saw around them. Social commentary
in exploitation films is rarely this subtle when it is the conscious creation
of the filmmakers (for social commentary as blunt instrument, see Robert
Thom and Barry Shear's Wild in the Streets).
This has all been given a heck of a revival by Subversive. The restoration
of the film elements is on display at the beginning of the disc (a la
Anchor Bay's edition of Night of the Living Dead), and I recall
a previous edition of this movie on an unwatchable tape by some fly by
night video outfit (Magnum, maybe? I don't recall). Boutique labels like
Subversive, Anchor Bay, and Blue Underground are mining the odd corners
of cinema more and more, and if THIS film merits such loving treatment,
I can't wait until someone gets around to, say, Massacre at Central
High. I can't help but wonder what else is out there that I haven't
even heard of. We shall see, I guess...
1/25/05
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