Breakinger
A Brilliant Conflict
Marva
It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,
trashgang
This is again some kind of stranger from the video nasties list. I have seen the uncut version of this flick and I found it not that good after all. There is a lot of talking and not that much blood in it. And if there's blood you will only see the blood flowing, never the damage done on the body. The roughest bloodscene is undoubtedly the castration. Anyway if your in for a more psychological flick than this is your kind of movie. There isn't any witch in it, the title only refers to the painting of Venus. Why this flick was ever on the list is still for me a mystery. I guess it's the fact that a child is raped and abused by her father, sometimes you see flashbacks to rape scene's. I also don't understood why this movie has a high rating. I almost fell asleep while watching it. Must be me I guess, not my kind of horror but to collect all the video nasties I had to have and watch it, could have been bloodier.
Witchfinder General 666
Before seeing "The Witch Who Came From The Sea" I only knew the pictures on posters and DVD covers, and that it was once on the BBFC's Video-Nasty list. I thought I was about to see a fast-paced and trashy gore-fest, but the film turned out to be quite the opposite of what I had expected. This is a rather slow-paced, weird, disturbing and also quite complex psychological Horror film whose reputation of being pure sleaze is more than unfair. Sure, the film is explicit and often engrossing in its depiction of sexual violence, but this is not the point of the film. This is vastly underrated film with a main focus on the psyche of its protagonist.Molly (Millie Perkins), who works in a sailor's tavern in a small New England nest, copes with her emotional stress by playing with her beloved nephews, and by drinking. She tells her nephews stories about their 'heroic' grandfather, a sailor, who was really a drunk child-molesting scumbag who had no scruples to abuse his own little daughter to gratify his sexual perversions. But her drinking habit is not Molly's only way of coping with her traumatic past, as the emotionally distressed woman's sex life begins to show murderous tendencies...Millie Perkins delivers a great performance as the Molly, a woman who, in spite of becoming murderous herself, is always mainly a victim. Lonny Chapman is also very good in the role of Long John, the tavern-owner, who is both a fatherly friend and a lover to Molly. The film is full of complex and interesting characters, and the photography is great. The flashbacks to Molly's terrible childhood are sad, shocking and hard to digest. Some people's desire to advocate censorship is mainly inspired by the idiotic assumption that any form of explicit on-screen violence will lead to real-life violence. "The Witch Who Came From The Sea" is a film that shows violence in a disturbing way that could in no way be misunderstood as glorifying. The fact that it was ever put on the Video Nasty list is the perfect proof for the idiocy of film-censors world wide. The film may have a few flaws, but its qualities are definitely predominant. Slow-paced and yet often shocking "The Witch Who Came From The Sea" is an underrated, disturbing and compelling psychological Horror drama that I highly recommend.
ThrownMuse
Millie Perkins goes from "Anne Frank" to totally whacked-out in this strange drama about a mentally disturbed chick who can't differentiate between fantasy and reality. If you're a beach-dwellin', speedo-wearin' football playin' beefcake, you're going to want to stay far away from this little lady. The DVD cover-art makes this look like a 70s fantasy-type movie, but it's really an exploration of an abused woman's madness. It's wickedly fascinating and tackles some themes that are risqué, even by 70s horror standards. If you're looking for graphic violence, this isn't for you, but any fan of psychological horror should get a kick out of this one.
Maciste_Brother
When I decided to watch THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA, I was expecting some sort of groovy 1970s exploitation kinda film. It looked promising during the beginning: we see a woman on the beach who daydreams about killing the three big muscular guys who are exercising nearby. That moment was filled with gratuitous sexualized violence (the bulging guys are nearly naked). Cool! Then as the film went along, the by-now-crazy woman actually kills two football players by castrating them. Not a pleasant thing to watch but I'm up for some cheap thrills. But after that, there's almost nothing. It's just talk, talk, talk. The castration scene was pretty good. The build-up at least. But once the woman started "operating" on the men, the result was underwhelming. Everything was done off-screen (like the Japanese film, AUDITION) and what little gore there was, if wasn't convincing at all. Not that I wanted to see all the gory details but the result was not very convincing. Practically everything in this movie was done off-screen, including the movie itself. Seriously, there's no story, there's no semblance of terror or horror. The psychology is silly. The flashback scenes between the father and the daughter were funny but oddly effective (and the reason why this film was considered a "nasty" by the British film board). The actors were good but the script is such a mess or it doesn't know what to do with this crazy character that no amount of good acting could have saved this. It's meant to be seen as a whimsical (yes, whimsical!) psychological portrait of a crazy woman but the film itself comes off looking completely drunk. There's no structure to it whatsoever. It ambulates forward without any purpose. To titillate? To enlightened? To shock? To make us laugh? Nope. None of that.The most disappointing thing about THE WITCH WHO CAME FROM THE SEA is that it promises to be trashy and, mainly because in which decade this was made, it would be chock full of gratuitous nudity. Nope. Aside from a few shots of the lead actress' breasts and a few quick shots of some naked people not worth mentioning, there's NO nudity to be seen, female or male. It's odd that for a film about castration, we never get to see what the crazy woman was so obsessed about those men. It's a film that basically pleases no one: fans of trashy films or fans of quirky and original alternative films.
