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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