Blood Brides starts on a high speed train late one night as a newly married woman still wearing wedding dress is brutally murdered by John Harrington (Stephen Forsythe), Harrington co-owns & runs a fashion house that specialises in designing & making bridal wear for weddings. Harrington is a self confessed paranoiac & is quite mad, he murders his best customers on their wedding night for bitter & twisted motives but the police are getting closer, Inspector Russell (Jesús Puente) suspects that Harrington is a serial killer of newly married women but lacks the proof to arrest him. As Harrington slips further into madness & decides to murder his overbearing wife Mildred (Laura Betti) the police edge closer & soon Harrington finds himself haunted by his terrible crimes...
Also known as An Axe for the Honeymoon (which is the original Italian titles literal translation) & maybe most widely Hatchet for the Honeymoon this Italian & Spanish co-production was photographed, written & directed by Mario Bava & is apparently considered a bit of a classic amongst his fans but I have to say Blood brides didn't do anything for me & I found it rather pointless. The script starts off like a murder mystery as a meat cleaver wielding killer dispatches a blushing bride on a train but that soon gets dropped as the killers identity is revealed almost immediately at which point Blood Brides becomes a psychological thriller in the vein of American Psycho (2000) complete with ever increasingly bizarre voice overs from the killer & then ends up as a supernatural ghost story as maybe or maybe not the ghost of Harrington's dead wife pops up to torment him. I can't say I liked Blood Brides at all, I found it rather rather dull & pedestrian as well as not making that much sense. There are some silly moments, some really dumb character's & a story that never really appealed to me. At almost 90 minutes long Blood Brides drags at times with long stretches where next to nothing happens & even the so-called twist ending is weak that is basically a rip-off of Psycho (1960) with yet more Mother related madness. I just don't get all the love for this but each to their own I suppose & as long as I don't have to sit through it again I ain't that bothered who likes it...
With very little in the way of actual suspense or plot I suspect that Bava was more interested in the visuals here than the narrative, sure there are some surreal moments & a few memorable images but even then I wouldn't call Blood Brides visually stunning or even particularly striking. There's no real blood or gore here, a bit of blood splatter & that's about it. The camera spins, goes out of focus, films from unusual angles & whatever else Bava decided to do to try & make banal scenes stand out & have some sort of deep metaphorical meaning that personally I just couldn't buy into. The film that is shown on telly is Bava's own Black Sabbath (1963) while the Spanish villa where the majority of Blood Brides is set was once owned by Spanish dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco.
Filmed in Barcelona in Spain, Paris in France & Rome in Italy this looks nice enough & was apparently filmed late 1968 but not released until 1970. The film is dubbed into English so it's always hard to judge the acting, it seems alright.
Blood Brides, or whatever title you see it under, is a strange psychological thriller that I would struggle to even class as horror & with boring character's & a predictable story I wasn't that impressed. Also, why is a hatchet referred to in the title when Harrington's weapon of choice is more like a meat cleaver?
Also known as An Axe for the Honeymoon (which is the original Italian titles literal translation) & maybe most widely Hatchet for the Honeymoon this Italian & Spanish co-production was photographed, written & directed by Mario Bava & is apparently considered a bit of a classic amongst his fans but I have to say Blood brides didn't do anything for me & I found it rather pointless. The script starts off like a murder mystery as a meat cleaver wielding killer dispatches a blushing bride on a train but that soon gets dropped as the killers identity is revealed almost immediately at which point Blood Brides becomes a psychological thriller in the vein of American Psycho (2000) complete with ever increasingly bizarre voice overs from the killer & then ends up as a supernatural ghost story as maybe or maybe not the ghost of Harrington's dead wife pops up to torment him. I can't say I liked Blood Brides at all, I found it rather rather dull & pedestrian as well as not making that much sense. There are some silly moments, some really dumb character's & a story that never really appealed to me. At almost 90 minutes long Blood Brides drags at times with long stretches where next to nothing happens & even the so-called twist ending is weak that is basically a rip-off of Psycho (1960) with yet more Mother related madness. I just don't get all the love for this but each to their own I suppose & as long as I don't have to sit through it again I ain't that bothered who likes it...
With very little in the way of actual suspense or plot I suspect that Bava was more interested in the visuals here than the narrative, sure there are some surreal moments & a few memorable images but even then I wouldn't call Blood Brides visually stunning or even particularly striking. There's no real blood or gore here, a bit of blood splatter & that's about it. The camera spins, goes out of focus, films from unusual angles & whatever else Bava decided to do to try & make banal scenes stand out & have some sort of deep metaphorical meaning that personally I just couldn't buy into. The film that is shown on telly is Bava's own Black Sabbath (1963) while the Spanish villa where the majority of Blood Brides is set was once owned by Spanish dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco.
Filmed in Barcelona in Spain, Paris in France & Rome in Italy this looks nice enough & was apparently filmed late 1968 but not released until 1970. The film is dubbed into English so it's always hard to judge the acting, it seems alright.
Blood Brides, or whatever title you see it under, is a strange psychological thriller that I would struggle to even class as horror & with boring character's & a predictable story I wasn't that impressed. Also, why is a hatchet referred to in the title when Harrington's weapon of choice is more like a meat cleaver?