"Why don't you shave me, you hot, sweet, little bitch?"

What makes a good movie? Conventional wisdom would suggest it takes a good story, a good script, good actors, good lighting, photography, and so on. It takes a lot of planning and that plan has to be executed perfectly. A lot has to go right for you to enjoy a good movie.

But to make a fucked-up movie? That takes something so much more special -- a blend of madness, ingenuity, grit and happenstance.

I prefer fucked-up movies, because they challenge the viewer to address the great existential questions like, "What the fuck am I watching?" and "Why the fuck am I still watching this?"

This isn't to suggest that good and fucked-up are mutually exclusive attributes. There are scores of good, even great, fucked-up movies. Nobuhiko Obayashi's House or David Lynch's Eraserhead come to mind. But the movie I want to tell you about doesn't quite achieve that same art-house status.

This week's Thursday Thriller is The Witch Who Came from the Sea.

This 1976 Matt Cimber film may come up short on plot but is long on weirdness. It stars Millie Perkins as Molly, a deeply troubled cocktail waitress who likes to take her nephews to the beach and spin her delusional yarns about their grandfather and how he was a sea captain, a perfect gentleman. He never returned from his last voyage.

Meanwhile, she notices some body builders and the conspicuous bulges in their swimsuits. She begins to entertain fantasies about them having violent deaths.

Molly loves to watch TV and develops obsessions with football players and actors in razor commercials. She compares them to her father, but when her sister Cathy (Vanessa Brown) reminds her that Dad wasn't a great sea captain, but rather a drunk and a child molester, Molly races to the liquor cabinet for a swig. She escapes into a fantasy of seducing two football players, smoking them out, tying them down, and slashing their legs to ribbons with a razor.

But was it a fantasy? The next morning after sleeping with her boss Long John (Lonny Chapman), the TV news reports that the football players have been murdered.


The Witch Who Came from the Sea is a trippy, bloody mess of a film with significant screen time devoted to Molly's naked body and a lot of sleepy stretches between the violent bits. It's a decent early slasher that might make for a good party movie or bedtime story. It streams on Shudder and Amazon Prime.