A movie must be good if I still liked it despite the main character being a woman who literally emasculates various men. That the movie succeeds in having the audience sympathize with her is even more remarkable. Unlike the horrible rape-revenge films of the 70’s where this was a frequent element, at least 1976’s The Witch Who Came from the Sea does not attempt to justify these castrations.
Millie Perkins stars as this serial killer. She is disturbingly child-like at times, and prone to talking in a sing-song manner as if she’s always recording an audio book for children, even when she isn’t taking care of her sister’s (Vanessa Brown) kids. Consider this line from her ramblings as they stroll on the beach: “it’s a long way from pole to pole, with many an island and many a mermaid twixt in between.”
It is especially unnerving how she talks about her dead father, in a hyper-idealized manner which suggests there was something amiss in that relationship. She keeps telling her nephews he was a boat captain and was too perfect to live on the land. At one point, Brown interjects that “he was an evil bastard and you know that more than anyone.”
In a flashback, we will eventually see at least one time Perkins’s father molested her. That is very difficult material to handle properly, and the way the event is portrayed here is deeply disturbing, though only for the right reasons.
Another aspect of her personality I found intriguing is her overactive imagination. She is almost as obsessed with television as Peter Sellers’s character in Being There, and doesn’t believe something really happened unless it was on the tube. Even from the first scene, we can tell she’s unstable, as she watches bodybuilders on the beach playground, first checking out their packages before imagining them all dead in various ways. As for myself, I just wondering if it is typical of bodybuilders to work out on children’s playgrounds.
Then again, the area where this was shot is pretty weird. The real locales the film was shot in are universally gross. I was also bewildered by the great many seemingly abandoned locations we see in many exteriors. Despite the all-American cast, I thought they filmed this in a Soviet Bloc country. Thanks to IMDB, I discovered it was indeed filmed in a desolate, backwards place, that being Santa Monica.
The film has an interesting slant on the omnipresent sexuality of the era, seemingly condemning some locker room type talk we hear in the bar where Perkins waits tables. There’s a customer who is looking for a virgin and another says the only such girls are five year olds who can’t run faster than their brothers. Unfazed, Perkins has a typically elliptical observation to add to the conversation: “Virginity goes to the lost and found department. Lose it, just drink up and you’ll find it again.” Even some of the women have odd thoughts about sexuality, such as a fellow waitress who claims of two pro football players found dead are, in her words, “faggots. All football player are faggots.”
Those football stars were the most recent victims of Perkins, and we see their deaths in a scene that is so dreamlike as to only be confirmed as reality when we later hear a news report. Pot and other drugs had rendered these two beefy guys helpless. Instead of the three-way they thought was going to happen, she ties them to each other and to the bedposts. Then she castrates them a straight-razor. Strange, but the way they were arranged and the manner of their death recalled the Coffin Rock story in The Blair Witch Project.
I have little tolerance for gore and what we see here butted up against, but didn’t cross, my particular limit. An odd element of the film is the extent of nudity, as I swear Perkins is completely or partially topless almost more than she is buttoned up. Even so, I wouldn’t describe it as exploitive. It’s more like she just happens to have her breasts exposed and isn’t even aware of the effect this might have on some men.
The most decent man in this film is one who doesn’t appear to be very promising initially. Lonny Chapman owns the bar where Perkins works and he seems as crass as many of the others she’ll meet. But it is telling he is the only man she has sex with who is not physically hurt by her. I think that’s because he is the only one who shows genuine compassion towards, and empathy for, her.
And empathy is what makes The Witch Who Came from the Sea a better film than it would have been in most other hands. Everything about this low-budget film reeks of the grindhouse era, but it aims highly than the vast majority of that fare. What is most surprising is it isn’t really a horror film, but a serious drama disguised in the trappings of the genre.
Dir: Matt Cimber
Starring Millie Perkins, Lonny Chapman, Vanessa Brown
Watched as part of Arrow Video’s blu-ray set American Horror Project Vol. 1