User Reviews

John Harrington (Stephen Forsyth) is a real sick-o who hacks up brides-to-be with a "hatchet" (actually what we here in the U.S. would call a meat cleaver). We hear John's thoughts ("The fact is, I'm completely mad!") and flashbacks reveal that John killed his own mother because his disapproved of her new lover. He lives in a mansion with his older, wealthy, bitter, controlling witch of a wife (Laura Betti), who is obsessed with the occult and returns as a nagging ghost after John offs her. The victims (models who work for John's wedding dress company) are lured to a secret room full of mannequins.

Stylish, bizarre touches, some humor, a few effective shocks and Bava's always creative and colorful direction make this rewarding viewing for horror fans OR people just interested in learning how to enliven a stale plot through audacious presentation. However, since the killer's identity is evident from the beginning, there's little suspense and mystery to the story and the American release is, needless to say, poorly dubbed. Despite that, it's still a fun, entertaining film and I recommend it.

Having cast the original giallo mold with Sei Donne Pour L'Asassino, the template for over one hundred more to follow, Maestro Bava hovers between serial sex murderer films and ghost stories with this stylish and lyrical ode to morbidity and necrophilia that begins as a killer-thriller and morphs almost seamlessly into a supernatural chiller. It's a leisurely, slow moving movie with several shocks that are given away in the film's poster. Bava inverts the giallo formula he created. Unlike the average Italian nero-thriller with its unknown protagonist, Hatchet begins with full disclosure of the killer's identity. His current killing spree is based on his childhood murder of his mother and her lover. a homicidal fury rooted in sexual rage and jealousy. As an adult he kills brides to recreate the sexual excitement he felt killing his mother and to remember why he kills. His slow remembrance in blurry flashback moments is a big part of the plot. It's also why he marries a woman who is more a nagging mother figure than a sexual partner, a companion for whom he has no physical need since he cannot perform as a man nor does he have the interest. This is pressed home by a séance scene early on in which his wife, a spiritist, channels his murdered mother. At the end of Psycho, Norman Bates tells the audience in a voice-over that he wouldn't hurt a fly. In the beginning of Hatchet, John Harrington coolly feeds a fly he's caught to his bird. He is a proto-metro-sexual, a macho GQ Man, a forerunner of American Psycho Patrick Bateman as others have pointed out. Arrogant and haughty, a pseudo-aristocrat so smug he practically caresses the door handle of the train compartment he exits after slaughtering a newlywed couple, covering it in fingerprints that the police seem to ignore. While his dandified behavior may seem familiar, there were no similar characters in any subsequent Bava movie. Santiago Moncada's Freudian-orientated script is very well thought out in a subtle manner while Bava seems to apply a few personal and recognizable brush strokes of his own: As in Sei Donne, the action centers around a fashion house and the victims are fashion models.(The concept of a psycho killer making love to female mannequins in a secret room also appears in Umberto Lenzi's Spasmo with Robert Hoffman.) The police are plodding and inert (again Sei Donne). The killer is tormented by the ghost of the victim or the hallucination of a ghost (The Whip and The Body).A murderous child is a prominent character as in Operation Fear, Bay of Blood and to a lesser extent in the Wurdulak episode of Black Sabbath. Bava's cinematography is alway wonderful but Hatchet does not have the photographic beauty or deep colors of Sei Donne, Planet of the Vampires or Black Sabbath. The main set piece is Harrington killing his wife. Faced with the prospect of a sexually needy wife, he goes berserk in a sexual panic, dons a bridal veil and applies lipstick, and in a perverted reversal of the wedding night, chases her around the bedroom and brutally chops her with his fetishized phallic weapon of choice, a cleaver (and not a hatchet, despite the US title). This scene is the most graphic and bloody yet extremely mild by giallo standards. The three other murders we see Harrington commit are very subdued compared to this, the gore and blood obscured by flashy visuals. That this film was rated PG with this kind of content once again proves that censors do not really think when they watch a film, fortunately, and look for only the most obvious moments but never grasp the sub-text. That's why Jess Franco movies got booked into Saturday kiddie matinees during the 1960s! After this murder, the film switches tracks completely and becomes a ghost story, with a twist. Harrington can't see his wife's ghost yet everyone else sees her. Or is he hallucinating? The audience sees her as a ghost, looking awfully spooky and creepy. Do the people around Harrington see her like this? Their behavior indicates that she looks normal to them. When he is finally arrested at the end, only he can see her spirit. Or is this a hallucination also, a manifestation of his madness? The original title "The Red Mark of Madness" is much better but lacked the punch distributors need to sell tickets. Instead of a bravura, violent, visually sensational ending that the audience expected from giallos, and one that Dario Argento would have provided, Bava ends on a low-key, crepuscular note. Overall, it's one of his best films and certainly underrated. Stephen Forsyth could have continued to make a lot of European films, he was better looking than most movie stars, but stopped because he did not like the roles being offered.

Spoilers

While this movie is definitely intriguing, it's never very interesting. Stephen Forsyth plays the heir of a bridal fashion house who has the compulsive need to brutally murder brides to be in order to get closer to a mystery that's locked inside his mind.

This movie is visually stunning, there's no denying that. Bava's use of color and lighting is very impressive. In short, this movie has style to burn. His flamboyant camera-work helps to give certain scenes a creepy feel to them, and certain scenes do work very well (Forsyth's visions of his recently departed wife) but that can't be said for the entire movie, sadly.

Apart from a few scenes, the movie is virtually suspenseless. Certain sequences that should have reached a grand finale (maybe some violence and gore could have rocked this boat) simply don't. Big parts of this film seem to be on a sedative. The script could have used some polishing, as well. The detective doesn't work at all here. Every scene between him and Forsyth seem out of place for the film, go on way too long and don't add anything further to the film. In the end, his relevance surfaces so I guess he couldn't have been deleted from the film. The dialouge is at times ridiculous, but as it is an Italian movie(basically), this is perhaps a pro instead of a con (Dario Argento movies spring to mind). And one last thing, who in their right mind could not spot the "shocking" ending at least an hour before the film's end. My verdict: 6/10

For about an hour it's about this guy who saw his mom get cleavered but has partially repressed the memory; he goes around killing newlyweds, convinced that the act will allow him to remember who the killer was. He also runs a wedding dress company and spends a lot of time in a creepy room full of mannequins, or talking to his bitch wife, or ogling his stable of vixen models. There's flashbacks, there's a seance, there's a great scene talking to the cops with his wife dripping blood off the staircase. Most unfortunately, the lead character is written as this self-conscious, snooty, "Hello, I am a psychopath" jerk; that plus there's another one of these stupid detectives. The lousy characters keep intruding on the cool, if cheap, film-making (there's a perfect, tossed-off audio cut between a skipping record and a police siren). But get ready for a REAL shock: sixty minutes in, after he kills his wife, she comes back as a cackling bitch wife ghost - so that what was up to this point a movie about the inner quest of a 'madman' is now, all of a sudden, a movie about a philandering prick whose dead wife keeps spoiling his pickups. (At one point he suggests a threesome!) This is at once the worst thing technically about HFAH, and hands down my favourite thing about it. Cool credit sequence graphics too.

It's fairly easy to guess who the killer is in this giallo: He's the guy with the hatchet on the train who is AT THE SAME TIME having a flashback and a hallucination who then murders a new bride and her husband. Just in case we're still not sure, he then narrates a long speech about how he's insane and likes killing and what not.

Yep, as this is a Giallo directed by Mario Bava, we now get the story from the killer's point of view. Turns out that John (as his dead mother keeps shouting in his head) is a psycho killer who has to kill brides in order to gradually reveal some sort of flashback involving his mother's death. Every time he kills, he gets a little more, but the police are closing in fast and there's that other problem.

That other problem being his wife, who hates him, loves the afterlife, and has a real bad tendency to hang around at all times, whether alive or dead. This leans the film in a really dark black comedy angle, as no matter what the playboy lifestyle loving John does, everyone sees his wife with him except him! This also leads to more scary aspects as it's not clear whether John is just mental or his wife really did come back from the dead. These scares would be further used in Bava's Shock, which is a genuinely creepy film.

Bava is also his own cameraman in this one, so we get loads of out-of- focus transition shots, loads of shots of people's reflections talking, and lots and lots of primary colours used to great effect. The music is suitably off-kilter as well, jumping between atonal madness to lounge jazz greatness.

The only downside for me would be that, just like many Gialli, the pacing isn't exactly set to 'racing'. That, and the sudden realization that Dagmar Lassander looks like the actor who plays Pennywise The Clown in the upcoming IT remake.

I've just checked again and she really does.

This film represents one of the few instances where I enjoyed an Italian film better in its English-dubbed incarnation (another I can recall is CASTLE OF BLOOD [1964]), which I first watched via the R2 Anchor Bay DVD. Still, the fact that the Italian dubbing on the DVD rental edition I now checked out was newly-recorded – rather than what was originally shown to theatres (the distinctive voice of the only Italian actress among the main cast, Laura Betti, is sorely missed) – wasn’t an enthusing prospect to begin with...

Anyway, the film is one of Bava’s most unusual – ditto for the giallo genre; rather than having a variety of suspects among whom to determine the killer, here the hero (who also acts as narrator) tells us upfront who it is – himself! This makes of it a sort of black comedy – even though handsome lead Stephen Forsyth doesn’t exactly set the screen on fire…and the film is, in any case, undermined by the deliberate pacing typical of the “Euro-Cult” style.

Bava here also served as his own cinematographer (with any number of smooth camera moves and striking compositions), and the result – with Forsyth’s villa and atelier (the latter, a familiar giallo setting) as attractive backdrops – is a beautiful-looking film; the editing, too, is creatively done. The various murders are, obviously, among the film’s highlights – as is Sante Romitelli’s memorable score (at once melancholically playful and creepily avant-gardist).

Perhaps the most effective scene is Betti’s murder halfway through (whom Forsyth kills while he’s decked out in a bridal veil!) – which is immediately followed by the arrival of the police on the scene to interrogate Forsyth on a previous victim (where the wife’s blood dripping from the stairs and reflection on a table-top could give the killer away at any moment); an amusing in-joke here is the fact that Forsyth had been watching a TV screening (in black-and-white) of Bava’s own BLACK SABBATH (1963)! Also interesting are Betti’s numerous apparitions (which again stresses the absurdist/psychological aspects of the plot, since this is clearly not a supernatural tale): at first, Forsyth can’t see her but everyone else can – so, to make doubly sure, he exhumes her interred body, burns it in his incinerator and, then, keeps her ashes constantly with him inside a leather bag!; when he’s finally captured, the situation is reversed – the wife determined to haunt Forsyth till his dying day!

Lovely “Euro-Cult” starlet Dagmar Lassander plays the heroine who, even though she’s eventually revealed to have served as police-bait for the killer every step of the way, demonstrates genuine affection for Fosyth throughout. Incidentally, the police inspector is unusually perceptive for this type of film and, at various points in the narrative, he lets Forsyth know that he’s his chief suspect – even equating the latter’s greenhouse (where plants are made to grow in an unnatural manner) with the inner workings of a madman’s mind!

While the final revelation isn’t really much of a surprise, it’s interesting that a piece of the puzzle which haunts Forsyth – he also receives intermittent visits from himself as a child, to act as a guide through his hazy past – is seen to fall into place with each new murder of a bride! By the way, the film was an Italian/Spanish co-production written by Santiago Moncada – whose work includes two other fine “Euro-Cult” offerings, THE CORRUPTION OF CHRIS MILLER (1973; still unavailable on DVD, though I did get to catch it on DVD-R while in Hollywood in late 2005/early 2006) and A BELL FROM HELL (1973).

HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON (Mario Bava - Italy/Spain 1969)

Every time John Harrington hacks up a bride on her wedding night with a meat cleaver, he is able to recall more details from his childhood about the mysterious death of his mother, whom he apparently adored. Compelled to discover the killer's identity and unable to cope any longer with marital arguments, he even takes a hatchet to his own bitchy wife Mildred, who returns to haunt him as a ghost that everybody can see, but him. The increasingly deluded madman imagines that Mildred is still torturing him and gives in to one more murderous deed in order to discover the true nature of his childhood experience.

A creative reworking of Hitchcock's PSYCHO (1960) springs to mind, but in this case it's patently clear from the start who killed John Harrington's mother. The film is sometimes categorized as a Giallo but while it's offers some traditional giallo elements, the mystery element is negligible since it's quite obvious who killed the madman's mother and the traditional detective or amateur sleuth is - again - Harrington himself. Nevertheless, in terms of lighting and camera-work (Bava started to experiment with subjective camera techniques in the opening train scene for the first time), he delivered another stylish piece of work, although at times, the zoomlens goes into overdrive. And Bava shows he can deliver a number of very effective suspense scenes. The best sequence occurs during the aftermath of his wife's murder. The suspicious police inspector, who keeps returning to Harrington to clear up minor points, inquires about the screams which emanated from the house just minutes before. Harrington covers himself by showing the detective a scream-filled horror movie (Bava's own "Black Sabbath") which just happens to be playing on television. Meanwhile, the audience can see the dead woman's corpse hanging over the edge of his bannister, dripping blood just feet away from the inquisitive inspector. An eerily effective moment that will have you rooted for the killer, hoping he will not be exposed.

The supernatural angle, the haunting of John by Mildred's vindictive spirit, makes this strangely constructed film hard to categorize. Nevertheless, Bava considered this one of his favorites and it was one of the few films - if not the only one - where he had complete creative control and the end result wasn't completely butchered by ignorant producers or distributors. The film is even surprisingly restrained, which largely explains the relatively smooth distribution potential. The six murders are never shown graphically on screen and the amounts of gore and blood are restricted to a minimum. Furthermore, the story is fairly straightforward, but never terribly engaging and leading man Stephen Forstyth has the charisma of a wooden puppet. Sante Romitelli's score is not a total success either with its sudden transitions from frenzied fear themes to gentle harpsichord melodies and lush orchestrations. All in all, an interesting film from a cinematographic perspective but the results are not very effective and not enough to rank this as one of Bava's best, let alone as one of the better Giallos, if categorized as such. The film's theme was reworked in the American slasher HE KNOWS YOU'RE ALONE (1980).

Camera Obscura --- 6/10

I've always considered Hatchet for the Honeymoon one of the "weaker" Bava films. It doesn't have the artistry of Black Sunday or the flair of Blood and Black Lace. Even with these perceived flaws, a weak Bava is still an enjoyable experience.

The basic story: Models and customers of a wedding gown design house are turning up dead on their wedding day. Each one viciously killed by a hatchet (meat clever) wielding maniac. It's not difficult figuring out who the killer is. Hatchet for the Honeymoon doesn't follow the normal rules of a horror/mystery. Think of it as a backwards Giallo. There are no clever red herrings, no suspicious characters, and no dead-end clues. Instead, the main character, John Harrington (Stephen Forsyth), reveals early on that he's a crazed killer. A bit of dialogue uttered by John early in the movie give tremendous insight into his character – "A woman should only live till her wedding day. She should love once and then die'."

But in this case, our killer feels he has a justifiable (albeit selfish) reason to kill. Each time he murders a woman, a vision that has haunted him becomes clearer. He's obsessed with discovering the meaning of the vision. How many brides must die before John discovers the secret of his vision?

John also has a nagging wife whom he would like to divorce. But, it seems that she has the money and won't let him go. Instead, she would rather make his life miserable. Deciding he can't take anymore of his wife, John kills her. Still not wanting to leave John, the wife's ghost continues to torment John. In a bizarre twist, John – the lunatic – is being driven mad by his wife. Is it possible for a homicidal maniac to be driven crazy?

The performances are fairly standard for this kind of film. Stephen Forsyth is more than adequate for the role of the hunky (did I just use that word) killer. I've always felt that his wife, played by Laura Betti, is the only real weak point in the cast. She just doesn't come across very naturally. In scenes where she is tormenting John from the grave, she's appears to be nothing more than an actress playing a part. I never bought into her performance.

While there are flashes of Bava's brilliance, much of Bava's trademark style seems muted. For example, while the room of mannequins makes a nice scene, it's not awash in color like scenes from Bava's Black Sabbath or Blood and Black Lace. Instead, it's a fairly dark room without any terribly unusual lighting. It's not that Bava's work here isn't impressive, because it is. There are scenes shot through peep holes and small windows that show other facets of Bava's creativity.

I should also mention the score. The music, by Sante Maria Romitelli is a real asset to the movie. Much of it is a loving, soft, romantic score. This type of music mixed with the idea of burying a hatchet in someone may seem inappropriate, but it makes these scenes even more chilling. A perfect example of this is the music box tune John plays when killing the bride in the mannequin room. It's a very effective use of music.

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.

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?

Average to poor acting, brought down by dubbed voice-overs. The main theme (of each murder giving Forsyth a clearer view of what happened to his mother on her last night) is clever, as is much of the camera work (seeing his wife's corpse reflection in the coffee table as he speaks to the detective; the blurred view of her ghost coming slowly into focus as she climbs the stairs to his bed). But otherwise there isn't a lot to recommend this. For a horror film, this has virtually NO suspense and the murder scenes themselves are pretty anticlimactic. I admit that the beauty of Dagmar Lassander and Femi Benussi were one of the reasons I stuck with the film to the end.

Bava shines with his usual moments of excellence with the camera but they can't save an otherwise flawed film. I have this on a cheap compilation DVD, so my print was less than spectacular. Perhaps Bava fans will blame my review on that, and perhaps with a better, widescreen print, I would get more out of the visual look of the film and be more forgiving of the film's other faults.