Entry 61: The Witch who Came from the Sea (1976)

The Witch Who Came from the Sea (1976)

Dir: Matt Cimber

"Molly really knows how to cut men down to size!"


Molly (Millie Perkins, The Diary of Anne Frank, Wall Street), babysits her two nephews on the beach, regaling them with tails of her father, who she describes as "beautiful" and "as great as Christopher Columbus!"  See, pops was a sea captain who disappeared at sea 15 years ago, leaving Molly and her older sister Doris (Peggy Feury, All of Me) to fend for themselves.  Doris disagrees with Molly's opinion of their late pops, describing him as a "drunken bum" and a "monster."  Molly gets disturbed when she watches some prime 70's beefcake pumping iron on the beach (the slow-motion photography in these scenes and the short-shorts on display made me think I'd temporarily wandered into a gay porno flick).  After getting drunk, she hallucinates that a football player on television speaks to her about sailing the sea, then dreams of getting naked with the player and one of his teammates and erotically tying nautical knots (I'm not fucking with you).  Their conversation builds from initially playful beginnings and turns intense, ending with bear-titted Molly messily castrating both men with a dull straight razor.  Coming out of her alcohol-induced fantasy, Molly heads to a sleazy pierside bar, where she works as a cocktail waitress.  Molly's co-workers are all miserable people; bartender Long John (Lonny Chapman, The Birds, 52 Pick-up) complains endlessly about the menopause symptoms of his older employees, head waitress Cathy (Vanessa Brown, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir) gets drunk and calls him a motherfucker and regular patron Billy (Rick Jason, TVs Combat! and motherfucking Manimal) is a dirty old man obsessed with deflowering young virgins.  Molly is fucking Long John and, when she wakes up in his bed the next morning, a news report informs her that the two football players she fantasized about killing have, in fact, turned up dead.  As her sanity continues to unravel, Molly begins having visions of herself as a girl, with her father kissing her or showing up naked (in one particularly disconcerting sequence, young Molly screams repeatedly, her voice become more distorted with each shriek).  After having an S&M encounter with Billy at a party, Molly sleeps with commercial actor McPeak (Stafford Morgan, Another 48 Hrs, The Stunt Man) and has a naked mermaid tattooed on her stomach.  She has another flashback/hallucination in which her father becomes enraged over a B&W TV clown and his bellowing voice turns into howling wind (at this point, the movie has fully veered into Lynch territory).  As the police close in on the killer (the cops believe it to be a woman, though Cathy blames "faggots"), McPeak ignores Molly's phone calls and she hallucinates him slashing his own throat in the shower.  Later, she actually slashes his throat and castrates him post-coitus, then returns to Long John's covered in blood.  While Molly has visions of the dismembered bodies of her victims as chum on a raft, she confesses to the murders to Cathy and Long John, and we get a final flashback, which reveals that Molly's father (who had a mermaid tattoo on his stomach) died while raping her.  If things weren't already fucked up enough, Long John helps Molly kill herself with an overdose of pills, then invites her nephews to pour her a glass of vodka when they show up.  "Boys, aunt Molly needs to take a nap now..."

Jesus Christ, what else to say?  This is a difficult film to watch, and it's psychological dissection of a damaged, pitiable heroine reaches far beyond the usual Basement-of-Sleaze fair.  Perkins gives a fearless, riveting performance as Molly in this unfairly obscure psychological horror film/character study.  At it's (questionable) best, this film produced in me a level of discomfort equaled only by Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me.  And while it may not quite equal Lynch's masterpiece, it's still a daring, uncompromising and unapologetically grimy piece of filmmaking.  Director Cimber (a blaxploitation vet best known for The Candy Tangerine Man) keeps the camera prowling, the angles odd and, with the aid of moody cinematography by Dean Cundey (Halloween, Jurassic Park) creates a dreamlike atmosphere worthy of the film's fairy tale-ish title, but his insistence on toeing the line between trashy (lots of extraneous tit shots) and genuinely harrowing gives the movie an occasionally schizophrenic feel.  Worth a watch, but not the right choice for kicking back and relaxing with a beer after a long day's work (or family movie night!).