Popular reviews

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  Review by nathaxnne [hiatus] ★★★★★ 5

  A viscous whirlpool of nautical-themed alcoholism, father-daughter sexual abuse, seaside dive bars, prescription drugs, echoplexed castration-murder, the LA Rams, walk-in tattoo appointments, bad tv, The Little Mermaid, z-grade 70's Melodrama, severe mental illness totally overdriven to top-echelon bonker-ness in an era of supreme psychosexual bonker-ness, this yarn unravels and unravels until probably the most bonkers of them all. Weirdly entirely of its time and out of all times that are, there is nothing like 'The Witch Who Came From The Sea', now or ever again. Like if the oyster crackers turned out to be quaaludes, and it all started to go dark...

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  Review by Ian West ★★★★ 5

  A thought provoking exploitation meets art house slice of 70’s psychological horror, this Dean Cundey shot rundown seaside town set psychosexual sorrow video nasty is a razor castration childhood trauma murder nightmare that doesn’t hold back—it’s surreal, ugly, beautiful, grim, and Definitely in the running for one of the saddest horror movies I’ve ever watched.

  Kinda haunting, really.

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  Review by 1313: Tony the Terror😼🏳️‍🌈 ★★★★½ 10

  Well ya know if there’s anything better than watching a surreal 70’s horror jam, it’s watching another one the same evening, amiright? 

  I watch most of these movies and really have no idea how they came to exist. Like, how did these movies get dreamed up because they had to have been dreamed, through either sleep or drugs or both, but there is no way that these surreal 70’s horror jams got written on nothing more than a venti mocha with no whip because all the whipping cartridges were inhaled by people writing movies like this do you know what I’m saying here?

  Actually, the base plot line is pretty simple and has nothing to do with witches rising out…

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  Review by Sally Jane Black 2

  This review may contain spoilers. I can handle the truth.

  CW: abuse/rape, incest, suicide

  It's not as inevitable as this makes it seem. We don't have to beg for mercy in the form of a sleeping pill just to escape our traumas. There is healing in this world. It would not be an effective horror film, perhaps, if it acknowledged that, but none-the-less, it bears saying. The horror here is in Oedipal rape, not in the gruesome murders that Molly commits. Her own pain is far worse than the destruction she creates. The horror is that she is clearly still capable of love, yet her hope is all gone away. The horror is that she never escapes the pain. The horror is in the kisses at the end, as life slides away from her grasp.

  October count: 14/31

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  Review by laird ★★★★½

  Almost an inversion of the typical psychokiller movie where a male antagonist oggles female bodies and associates sex with death due to some traumatic childhood experience, but this peculiar Matt Cimber project doubles down on selling the trauma and gets deeper into the weird personality defects that result (including the occasional homicide) in the female protagonist. It's also frightfully absurd and funny, which saves it from being a feel bad slog. Doris (Peggy Feury) the sassy barmaid, in particular, is always a hoot when she's on screen, as is the character with a twitchy eye named Jack Dracula ("that's my real name"). Keep your guard up, though, it'll turn from silly to spine chilling in an instant.

  "Buck" Flower report: does not play a bum or a redneck!

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  Review by Slig001 ★★★½ 1

  This is one of the many films on the Video Nasty list that makes you question why it's actually on there? The Witch Who Came from the Sea is a grimey seventies flick, but it is lacking in any shocking gore scenes. Instead, we get a drama focusing on a young women, who suffered childhood trauma, which is now manifesting in her adult life. Millie Perkins takes the lead role and is really good in it. The film moves in a relaxed way and is very involving. The very dark themes just kind of wash over you gently, which just makes it even darker if anything! The film is rich with symbolism - Venus, mermaids, the ocean etc - but…

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  Review by Matt Winfield ★★★★

  HoopTober6.0 - Movie#6

  The reputation this movie has really does it a huge disservice. Going off the cover art, the censorship issues it had, and the reputation of the whole thing, I was expecting some grade-A schlock. This is totally the opposite. A thought provoking story of child abuse, sexual abuse, and a deep look at the P.T.S.D. that follows. All of this is filmed with a calm and controlled hand, not made to shock, and with an amazing dream-like cinematography. Sure, there are some killings throughout, but nothing I would call explicit. The way this movie got demonized and censored is a crying shame.

  Millie Perkins plays Molly, the victim of a abusive, rapist father. The majority of the…

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  Review by Branson Reese 1

  I was enjoying it but I did fall asleep. Usually I'd say that's on me, not the movie. But I think in this case the movie should take a single percent of the blame. I will never take less than 99% of the blame, that's the Branson Promise. If I forget about this promise later on down the line shut your fucking mouth.

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  Review by Tom Spearing ★★★ 8

  Don’t be fooled by that poster—this isn’t the supernatural gore-fest that the film evidently tried to market itself as. Sadly, our female protagonist doesn’t transform into a Medusan enchantress who rises out of the waves to entrance and decapitate her victims with a scythe. In fact, there is very little gore to speak of here at all (though it does feature in small doses). Instead, this is very much a psychological affair, built around Millie Perkins’ character, Molly—an alcoholic, sexually repressed bartender who struggles to deal with the traumas of her past. Molly seems to be in an almost permanent half-daze; prone to short-term memory loss and long bouts of daydreaming—her mind often conjuring up depraved, sadomasochistic encounters between her…

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  Review by Soumajit Nath ★★★★

  After having an all-day-cool (mostly) outdoor hang-out among oldtimers and long-ago crush, with a mood elevated for consuming blood and nasty-ass violence with popcorn and cold-drinks, I hopped into this dirt-bag list of video nasties and after shuffling all these (surely) my-type of horror gems once or twice, found this rotten and befuddled dizzying piece of infamous indie horror flick, glowing bright in wide range of other contemporaries for the poster, so hot and bloody and (also) so liberating! — Not a single second, I wasted there in thinking/wondering before diving into this escalating dark world, very rich for these twisted sea-side fables: one's about sad little mermaid who bleeds to sorrow for her tail gets chopped off and another…

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  Review by Michael501 📺 ★

  💀HOOPTOBER 7.0💀
  💀DECADES - 1970s💀
  💀FILM 36/36💀

  Anger stemming from being abused as a child drives an alcoholic's daughter to kill as an adult.

  My final film for this years Hooptober is also potentially the worst. Sorry, but this is just trash. I got my hopes up after seeing the poster, but that’s a totally different movie.
  Nice Poster, shame about the movie.

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  Review by Robert Berlin ★★★★ 3

  Spooky Scary Horrorthons 7 - Film #32

  A gnarly mixture of sex and violence. Tragic and very disturbing. Everything feels so violently distorted and irregular. Men appearing on TV show up dead shortly after partaking in sexual affairs and it is never quite clear if the sexual manslaughter that is shown to us is real or not. The only thing that seems for certain to be real is the child abuse that led to the violence taking place in the later adult life. Whether or not the violence shown onscreen is the violent fantasies of a victim or the work of a serial killer is largely left up for the viewer to decide.

  I don't have a lot of coherent thoughts to put forth about this one. The Witch Who Came from the Sea must be seen to be believed. Pretty cool of Cinemonster to bring this to my attention.