Wonderfully offbeat film!

Best movie of this year hands down!

This is ultimately a movie about the very bad things that can happen when we don't address our unease, when we just try to brush it off, whether that's to fit in or to preserve our self-image.

A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Impressive and coherent "video nasty" from the 1970's which is well worth a watch today. Sleazy and subversive but with a strong feminist undertone: the men in this movie are either matinee idols, muscle-bound hunks or weirdly trippy outsiders. Great exposition of the myths and power of the sea. The incest theme is well introduced and explored. The scene which explains "the witch who came from the sea" is also pertinent and profound.(It is so refreshing to me that Mary Whitehouse and the moral outrage of the 1980's did not in fact kill off such hidden gems).Not as savage as the likes of "I Spit on your Grave" or other female retribution flicks of its ilk, but with infinitely deeper emotional resonance.Pour a shot of rum and gaze out over the water... but watch out for the witch!

Molly's father was a sailor that ended up raping her when she was young - apparently Molly's sister was abused too but Molly keeps denying things that her sister says. Molly ends up getting her revenge on some men - by castration.WIKI: According to Hesiod's Theogony, Aphrodite/Venus was born of the foam from the sea after Saturn (Greek Cronus) castrated his father Uranus (Ouranus) and his blood fell to the sea.My take on this film: Molly's father was a sailor - so in a way, she comes from the sea like Venus. Molly's repression: she really wanted to castrate her father before he died but held it in for a long time - now her repression is manifesting itself by taking it out on the men she meets. At one point in the film, Molly starts speaking as if she was Venus saying "Would you die for love? Well, my father did" to a man that she ended up killing.It's an okay. The film would have been better, to me, if it wasn't done in the typical 1970s exploitation style. The idea behind the film is good - I'm not crazy about the way it's filmed though.3/10

Molly (Millie Perkins) is a girl who is haunted by a childhood of sexual abuse at the hands of her now dead father. These images are however, repressed by her, and she constructs a fantasy world where he did in fact die at sea - as he was an explorer of the sea. This we later find out is drawn from the euphemistic term Molly's father used to describe the abuse: "Molly, lets get lost at sea".This fantasy that Molly creates is also perpetuated in sequences that almost appear as if they are happening only in her broken mind. After seeing a couple of professional footballers on the TV (she describes them - and other men - as beautiful creatures to her two nephews), she seems to drift into a day-dream in which she ties the two up to a bed, in a pre-empted plan for sexual endeavour, but she proceeds to cut the penis off of one with a razor blade. As we later discover, these two footballers actually died. Whilst we are certain as an audience that Molly surely did this act, we seem to have no hard evidence of this. Is Molly simply imagining this?The film is punctuated with short, and increasingly graphic depictions of Molly's rape as a child by her father. These haunting sequences are exacerbated by the increasing volume and amount of perpetual seagull noises filtered through an echo effect. As these moments become more frequent, we find out that Molly's father died of a heart attack during an attack on her. So in Molly's own mind, as her father died during this act - an act he has a euphemistic phrase for - did indeed die at sea.Molly floats somnambulistically through the majority of this film. She seems almost not to be aware of the events that she is involved in. We seem to follow this path too. But we are also aware of her increasing breakdown. She becomes more erratic and confused about the people around her. She seems obsessed with television, and its ability to display the most beautiful people.This is no masterpiece, not by a long shot. But it is an interesting piece of cinema. Director Matt Cimber (who has made no other work of significance) unfolds the rapid mental breakdown with a little bit of style. The production values aren't the best, but they are suitable for the content. I did enjoy its mix of seeming supernatural and grindhouse- style elements. It almost plays like a lost and degraded artifact of horror/art-house cinema.This film bizarrely made it onto the UK's video nasties list (or at least the DPP list), where I can only assume was clustered with the more horrific films (such as 1972's Last House on the Left, 1977's I Spit on Your Grave) due to it's quite intense, but never graphic depictions of male castration.www.the-wrath-of-blog.blogspot.com

The enigmatically titled The Witch Who Came From The Sea is a bold movie both in theme and style, dealing with the sensitive issues of child abuse and incest in a surreal, dreamlike manner; but although director Matt Cimber's film will be admired by many simply for tackling its daring subject in such a unique way, I found the film to be a less than satisfying experience. A shame, since it all started off so well....The film begins with pretty Aunt Molly (Millie Perkins) and her nephews enjoying a day out at the beach. As the kids play in the sand, Molly focuses on the musclemen working out nearby, her gaze wandering over their rippling torsos and bulging trunks. At first she seems to be admiring their physiques, but in her mind, Molly imagines the men dead, their twisted, broken forms hanging lifeless from their exercise equipment. This nightmarish opening scene is extremely well handled, letting the audience know in no uncertain terms that something ain't quite right inside Molly's head.Sadly, such effective moments are few and far between: much of the running time is devoted to awkward character development; the bizarre narrative meanders all over the place; no-one in the film behaves or speaks like a normal human being; and nearly every scene is saddled with a whacked-out art-house vibe that might appeal to the more pretentious fans of cult oddities, but which left this particular viewer distinctly unimpressed.If, like me, you seek out this film because it is one of the legendary UK Video Nasties, be prepared to be disappointed by the lack of shocking imagery: although the film deals with a sexually abused young girl who grows up to become a razor wielding nutjob who castrates 'beautiful' men, there is actually very little in the way of gore, with the actual castrations occurring off-screen. What probably got the censors in a tizzy were the non-explicit-yet-still-disturbing incest scenes and a shot of Molly with blood over her breasts (believed to be a visual 'rape trigger' for some men). Personally, I was more upset by the godawful tattoo Molly has done on her stomach by a goggle-eyed old man with inks all over his face!