The Witch Who Came From The Sea - Day 3

Starting to fade….

A slight cough and sniffle….

Trouble sleeping….nightmare images seeping in….

The masterminds behind the Video Nasties series are deviously accessing unused parts of my brain and burning images deep into my subconscious. It's mind control I tell you!

Had to cool off. Take a step back. Take in something a little simpler. Bert I. Gordon to the rescue. Also known as Mr. B.I.G. He is mostly recognized for drive-in 50's, 60's and 70's B-movie fare. His films, like his name (B.I.G.) were about creatures and beasties that were larger than life. Dinosaurs in King Dinosaur, giant ants in Empire of the Ants, a giant spider in Earth vs. the Spider, a giant man in The Amazing Colossal Man and in the two features I saw last night, Food of the Gods (giant chickens, bees, rats, and worms) and The Cyclops (Giant lizards, a man, and a snake).

The Egyptian Theater hosted the Bert I. Gordon double feature with the director in attendance. It was a Wednesday evening, so I didn't expect a huge crowd, but the meager handful of 20 people sitting in this huge 700 seat theater was rather surreal and a little sad. Bert is now 90 years old. His films, in their day, were fairly popular in the B-movie circuit. So it was a little sad to see him show up and only have 20 people there. I guess he already had his day in the spotlight. 

Bert with the Cyclops mask

As a guest, he was really gracious and sweet. When his name was announced he stood up, looked back at the audience, smiled, gave a polite wave, and walked down to the front to answer questions. Some of the highlights:

* He sighted King Kong as his number one influence. Makes sense. You can even see that influence in the film shown that night - In The Cyclops the title monster fights a giant snake to protect the young heroine just like Kong. Also, the audience is invited to have sympathy for the monster, much like King Kong.

* The person asking questions got really Freudian with the whole size theme in his films. Even going as far as to reference the battle with the snake in The Cyclops. Wow! Cyclops, Snake, Big….Well….Mr. BIG was pretty uncomfortable answering these questions. "I think maybe I should see a psychiatrist" he said at one point.

* He started shooting films on 16mm when he was 9 years old. He would film his friends and family and then rewind the film so he could then photograph lizards and animals to superimpose over top of his subjects. 

* He told an interesting story about working with Orson Wells on Necromancy. Apparently Orson's secretary called to tell Bert that Orson only worked from 10AM-4PM. Well, that wasn't going to be easy to schedule. To only be available for 6 hours a day! So Mr. Gordon had the production deliver a fridge full of steaks, food and champaign to Orson along with a top notch chef to be his personal Chef on set. Orson arrived and the chef offered to prepare anything Mr. Wells desired. So Orson that day tells Bert to forget what his secretary told him. He's all his for as long as he needed him. 

The prints shown were OK. The Cyclops was sharp with good blacks, but had 2 reels that were warped so the film jerked around in the gate a bit. Food of the Gods was a little faded and several of the reels had huge red dots all over it. So that print was a little rougher. 

OK, break over. Time to go back for mind bending films at midnight at the Cinefamily. Time for another video nasty, The Witch Who Came From the Sea!

I was already excited for this. If you read my earlier post then you already know the line from the trailer, "Why don't you shave me you sweet, hot, little bitch!" Oh my! How can you resist a film with a line like that. The film did not disappoint.

In the preceding announcements for the film they mention that this is the first real "downer" movie. As the series progresses, more and more "downers" will creep into the picture. You see,  up until the mid to late 60's most films generally had happy endings. Sometimes bitter sweet, like King Kong, but mostly happy endings.  Not EVERY film, but most. Then in the late 60's film studios started steering away from the big budget pictures and started giving money to smaller films and taking chances on unknown directors. Smaller budgets meant less risk. So we start seeing films like Arthur Penn's, Bonnie and Clyde and John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy. Films started to turn dark. Happy Endings were no longer a guarantee. Audiences were no longer safe. This continued into the 70's when The Witch Who Came from the Sea was released. I can't imagine this film being made during any other decade. It's very 70's. 

Interestingly, like the previously shown Night Warning, we have another academy award nominee as the lead actress, Millie Perkins who was previously nominated for her performance in The Diary of Anne Frank. She gives another incredible and VERY brave performance here, but Oh sooooo different. If academy members saw this, I think they would immediately turn to stone, fall over, and shatter into a million pieces. The film was similar to Night Warning, but with a more serious tone.

We begin at the edge of the sea, Santa Monica California. Molly (Millie Perkins) tells her 2 nephews how wonderful their papa was. He was a sea captain. Then out of the corner of her eye she glimpses large hulks of men working out on the beach, like Arnold Swartzenegger big. Obsessively the camera lingers on their muscles. We get tight shots of their skimpy shorts stuffed with something rather large. I mean, c'mon, its like the filmmakers didn't even try to be realistic. It's as if they stuffed a freaking Teddy Bear down their shorts or something. Back and forth we go between her staring and our muscle bound figures working out, until suddenly we get flashes of them tied up, dead, and bleeding on the beach in their skimpy little shorts. There you go. That's your introduction to our lead character. The point I guess is Molly is not very stable.

Molly is an alcoholic. She is obsessed with men on television and she hallucinates and fantasizes about sadistic sex and murder. She is particularly infatuated with an actor from a razor commercial. One by one, she hunts down her obsessions and murders them. Lots of graphic violence, though the camera never lingers on the gore. More just cutaways of blood splattering. Lots of nudity. Lots of S&M. Lots of uncomfortable situations. Yeah, I can see why this was banned.

If you can take the subject matter, I highly recommend this. It is like nothing you have ever seen before. The dialogue is just  unbelievable.The line from the trailer is just a taste of what the dialogue and film is like. The print quality was a little faded and scratchy, but definitely watchable. Nothing so faded as to lose all color. Just faded color.

6 films in 3 days! Tonight I go see Axe! Stay tuned…..