Too much of everything

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

Bava is the personification of Italian Horror, and perhaps nowhere is the central axiom of this genre more apparent than in the highly personal Hatchet for the Honeymoon. A seemingly run-of-the-mill story involving one John Harrington (a wedding-dress only transvestite designer who murders his own luscious models), Hatchet for the Honeymoon is, on close inspection, both the thesis and antithesis of Italian Horror. Thesis, because the film is highly stylized and stays true to many genre tropes. But this film is often derided by Italian Horror fans for what on the surface seems to be a complete lack of originality – the banality of this particular plot seems like too much re-treading to most. The only diagetic mysteries in Hatchet for the Honeymoon are reasons and motivations. Identity and morality (two of the most common themes in the genre up until this film, if not the only themes) have no place here, hence antithesis.Not since Bava's The Girl Who Knew Too Much had an Italian Horror film focused so much on the psychology of just one character. John Harrington's psychology is in fact the main 'character' of the film. Each grisly murder unlocks a room in John's demented brain. Each room reveals a piece of his haunted past that might help him figure out why he kills, and always while wearing a wedding dress. His wife Mildred (played to the snarky hilt by Laura Betti, a legendary muse of Pier Paolo Pasolini) is a nagging, unsympathetic, infuriatingly fickle harpy, who we long for John to zero in on, but not before she gets out a few more fierce barbs. But contrary to the traditional fashions of Italian Horror, the murders are never really shown. Instead the viewer is lead to believe that each murder is a necessary, hallucinogenic, somatic, and almost innocent catharsis, simply leading John Harrington (and us) towards his cure, and towards the credits' final roll.In Blood & Black Lace, despite its intoxicating and never-seen-before palette of sanguine lushness, Bava was still quite reliant on script and plot to further his movies toward their inevitable conclusions. Suspense and the obligatory who-and-how-done-its were still vital to the resolution of the plots to Kill Baby, Kill and Bava's 1965 sci-fi touchstone Planet of the Vampires. Although each of those three films carefully nicked away at the singular stranglehold that 'dialogue and plot' had on the viewer's emotional involvement, a pure cinema of horror as yet eluded Maestro Bava. And by this notion of 'pure cinema', I'm referring to the aesthetics and visuals – the arguable responsibility of film to be more akin to photographic rather than theatrical devices. Whether or not Bava ever achieved a cinema of pure horror is something left to individual tastes, although I'd like to think that with Black Sunday he accomplished that goal right out of the gate.In Hatchet for the Honeymoon there's simply the subjective situation, needs and mystery of one man involved and at stake. There are no innocent villagers to save, no planet Earth to rescue from vampiric destruction, no revenge or morality play to push to its inevitable end. Just one ego. One psyche. One lens, if you will. In fact, is all of what we see on the screen even really happening to John Harrington in the world of the film itself? As Laura Betti has pointed out, having a script be nothing of importance to the filmmaker "is something that is not considered normal in America, yet I must tell you that all Italian directors do this. Even Fellini, Pasolini, and Bertolucci." In America it's an anomaly to have more than one screenwriter on a single film; in Italy almost the opposite is true. It's not unheard of for an entire production to have been shot from a few pages of notes, suggestions of dialogue if you will. Films via the set & camera, not via the page.I believe this is paramount in understanding Italian Horror and also perhaps why it is a genre often considered the 'gateway drug' between high-art film aficionados and lowbrow genre geeks. Art snobs appreciate the notion of visuals furthering a plot, the medium of film being self-reliant and self-referential, mood as the main, or rather most relevant, character, etc. And genre-philes often leap to "art films" after seeing Italian Horror, as they realize having to 'think' about movies isn't such a dumb/un-cool idea after all. Hatchet for the Honeymoon is Bava's tone poem – the film where he finally puts the script aside, consciously making the movie's atmosphere and theme the true main character. Incredibly enough, Bava also found the time to turn the giallo on its head in the process. In Hatchet, we know who the murderer is from the start of the picture. We know murders will have to continue. We can even securely guess the impetus for what John Harrington's doing; it's John himself who's having the hard time figuring it all out. Despite this being a film full of death, mayhem, insanity, psychoses, and perhaps even guilt, Bava had finally discovered a way to divorce sympathy and empathy from it all. Is this dehumanizing or even morally criminal? Most likely, yes. But is it fascinating, beautiful, striking, even downright funny? Without a doubt. Everything we've come to love about Bava up to this film is here, and in spades. With Bava trapped in an unhappy marriage himself, but being a good catholic never divorcing or even supposedly cheating on his wife, his passion towards Hatchet for the Honeymoon makes it among his most personal of works.

***SPOILERS*** Mario Bava slasher that took some five years to finally be released in the US has this very disturbed young man John Harrington, Stephen Forsyth, trying to find out the reasons behind his mother and step father's brutal murder when he was a young boy. John in fact witnessed the murders but has since totally forgotten who committed them. Now a young man John ruining a wedding dress shop in Italy is out to murder, with a hatchet or meat cleaver, young couples in order that it, the murders, would restore his memory of that tragic event!As we soon find out it's John's wife Mildred, Laura Betti, whom he's really out to knock off or hatched to death in that she's become a royal pain in his butt and keeps him from doing what he loves to do most, romance and murder beautiful brides, in getting in his s his way from doing it. Mildred also has control of the fashion design business, left to her by her mom, that makes John's sick dreams of murdering young brides possible. When John finally put an end to Mildred's pestering him by hacking her to death that his troubles, which he thought would now come to an end, began to intensify!Mildred instead of being dead pops up everywhere John goes and is seen by everyone but himself. This slowly drives him so mad to the point when he starts making mistakes in his murdering young brides that has the local police in the person of inspector Russell, Jesus Pvente, notice. It's the inspector planning a mole in Roy's wedding design shop that in the end leads to his downfall. Something that couldn't, where he'll be treated for his mental condition, happen soon enough for John's sake. In that by getting caught he'll finally get, in a prison psycho ward, that mental help & therapy that he so desperately needs!****SPOILERS*** After doing away with Mildred instead of having her dead and buried she became a bigger problem dead then alive to him. As for John himself his life long quest to find who murdered his mom and step dad came to and end with his last murder. Now completely and hopelessly insane John is condemned to spent the rest of his life in a mental institution and after that in when the sun don't shine and it hot all year around together with his murdered wife Mildred for all eternity. A fate that I wouldn't even wish on my worst enemy!

Laughably bad giallo film from Mario Bava. Full of pretensions and attempts at being something more artistically memorable than it is. Insipid performances, especially from Stephen Forsyth. It's a movie that aspires to be spooky, creepy, frightening -- but all it really achieves is to be unintentionally funny. It has some nice Bava visual touches here and there, as one might expect. But these touches don't overcome a silly plot, terrible music score, and guffaw-inducing narration. Completely lacking in the suspense and psychological terror it attempts to achieve. Obviously avid fans of the director will admire this a lot more. I happen to like a good many Bava films, despite their flaws. But this sort of stuff is too cheesy for my tastes.

Master Italian filmmaker Mario Bava once again directs with plenty of style, giving spice to an amusing plot that prefigures the slasher film "He Knows You're Alone" by a decade.The handsome Stephen Forsyth stars as John Harrington, the owner of a bridal shop. He's gone mad, yet still has the ability to reflect on his condition. He's married to a witchy woman, Mildred (Laura Betti) who refuses to divorce him, and is a haunted individual, living with a long ago trauma and witness to visions of himself as a child. This trauma now spurs him to murder his own models whenever they plan on getting married.As we can see, this story isn't a matter of whodunit. We're with our killer every step of the way, aren't entirely unsympathetic to his condition, and wait to see how soon the cops will catch up to him. In the meantime, Bava does amazing things with colour and atmosphere, crafting a powerful visualization of his protagonists' deteriorating mind.It takes until the second half for the movie to really kick into gear. Until then, it goes easy on the horror, with the murders parcelled out carefully and Bava making sure to cut away before things get very graphic. The second half gets effectively eerie, with the hallucinatory imagery really taking over as Johns' conscience starts to eat away at him. One wonderful sequence has the investigating detective (Jesus Puente) dropping in on John and interrogating him while the body of his most recent victim is still quite warm! (Bava fans will delight in seeing his earlier horror anthology "Black Sabbath" playing on TV during this sequence.) The music score by Sante Maria Romitelli is beautiful and haunting much of the time, yet gets appropriately discordant at certain points.A capable cast makes the most of the material, no matter how poorly they may be dubbed. Forsyth is believable at all times, Dagmar Lassander is appealing as the newest model to be hired by the shop, Betti is a hoot as the icy wife, and Femi Benussi is easy to watch as one of the unfortunate murder victims. Fans of European genre films will also recognize Luciano Pigozzi and Gerard Tichy among the supporting players.This isn't one of Bava's very best works (his period in the 1960s is when he really shone), but it's still pretty good of its type and deserves some respect and attention. If you're fan of Italian horror, it's well worth a look.Seven out of 10.