The poster for 1976’s The Witch Who Came from the Sea shows a woman with ample breasts and a bare midriff wearing a dark, flowing cape. In one hand, she holds a bloody scythe above her head. In the other, she holds a man’s severed head. Blood drips onto the rocky islet where she stands, waves breaking around her, her long hair swept up in the wind. “Molly really knows how to cut men down to size!!” the tagline reads in bright yellow letters, “cut” underlined with a stroke of red.

It’s a great poster, both trashy pulp advertising and beautiful painting, with impressionistic brushstrokes blurring the boundary between the turbulent sea and sky. It promises a supernatural fantasy with gratuitous nudity and pleasingly gory vengeance. The Witch Who Came from the Sea is not that movie. It’s something so much better.

Millie Perkins plays Molly, a barmaid who spends her free time drinking (too much), watching television (too much), and babysitting her nephews while her sister Cathy (Vanessa Brown) sews clothes to try and make ends meet between welfare checks. She regales her nephews with tales of her sea captain father, whose body she says was lost at sea.

I wrote about my beloved The Witch Who Came From The Sea for Fangoria! Read the whole thing here.