The Witch Who Came from the Sea (Climber, 1976): Nickel Cinema, 6pm
This film was one of the original banned 'video nasties' in the UK in the 1980s.
Nickel Cinema introduction:
A
troubled woman named Molly works nights as a waitress at a seaside
bar while caring for her young nephews by day. Haunted by memories of
childhood abuse at the hands of her sea‑captain father, she
becomes increasingly tormented by nightmares and fantasies. As her
grip on reality slips, she begins seducing men and enacting a brutal,
vengeful murder spree. Bleak and disturbing, The Witch Who Came from
the Sea is more psychological horror than supernatural — a grim
portrait of trauma, repression, and rage that turns intimacy into
terror and the ocean’s memory into a twisted obsession.
Starburst Magazine review:
If you ever find yourself arguing that the idiots behind the ‘video nasties’ list didn’t have a clue what they were doing, The Witch Who Came from the Sea should be your Exhibit A. This film doesn’t deserve its schlocky reputation and it certainly has nothing to do with the evocative but incredibly misleading poster that probably put it on the list in the first place – there are no witches here, and certainly no warrior women brandishing decapitated heads. Instead, The Witch Who Came from the Sea is an intriguing and occasionally moving study of an abused young woman spiralling into insanity. True, it has the low-budget look of most ’70s exploitation movies, but Perkins’ extraordinarily nuanced performance, the psychologically incisive screenplay by her soon-to-be-ex-husband Robert Thom (Death Race 2000) and the classy cinematography by DOP Dean Cundey, who would later lens John Carpenter’s Halloween, The Fog and The Thing, elevates this controversial little psycho-shocker into the echelons of art. This isn’t some grubby video nasty designed to shock and titillate, this is a chillingly effective character study that occupies the shadowy middle-ground somewhere between Polanski’s Repulsion and Meir Zarchi’s I Spit on Your Grave.
Here (and above) is the opening scene.
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