Hatchet for the Honeymoon

John Harrington (Stephen Forsyth) is mad. Unusually he is both aware of and comfortable with this situation. A childhood truama compels him to ritually murder young brides, with each murder revealing fresh details of the scene.

Tired of his own wife, Mildred (Laura Betti), John seeks a divorce. But Mildred, who has worked hard to make the bridal wear business John inherited from his beloved mother into a success, is unwilling to accede to his demands.

So John decides to do away with his wife. But, with the police increasingly suspicious when they notice all the dead brides share a connection to Harrington's and, worse, Mildred's spirit haunting him (though, unusually, others can see her whereas he himself cannot), John finds things the life of an insane playboy isn't so easy after all…

Mario Bava's return to the giallo after a relatively long absence sees the director reprise the fashion house setting from Blood and Black Lace, but with a very different, much less brutal and vicious, tone.

From the offset, when Bava cuts from stock footage of the real train on which Harrington (as yet unidentified) has just killed once more, to a very obvious model, accompanied by the same noises, before then revealing his protagonist playing with a toy, it's clear that this is a comparatively light-hearted, tongue-in-cheek entry more in line with Arsenic and Old Lace and Whatever Happened to Aunt Alice than Psycho (though, to be sure, there are those who would claim it to be above all a black comedy) and vertigo.

Making extensive use of flashbacks, voice over and subjective camera and presenting the murder sequences in a carefully abstracted rather than explicit manner, the director invites the spectator to identify with Harrington. Like Chaplin's Monsieur Verdoux, you can understand why he kills. But whereas Chaplin used his film to comment on the ironies and iniquities of a world that accepted war as a reasonable way for one nation to advance its interests over another whilst denying the same policies at the level of the individual (albeit in his fuzzy humanist way), Bava appears to have no such grand statements in mind. All his protagonist wants (in common with many in the late 60s, one supposes) is self-knowledge. Yet, like a modern-day Oedipus, the truth will destroy him rather than set him free.

Perhaps Hatchet for the Honeymoon's only weakness (other than the fashion crimes that always impart a degree of kitsch charm anyway) is that the central mystery really isn't up to much. It was old and obvious when used in the Boris Karloff vehicle Grip of the Strangler ten years previous.

But, taken as a whole, murder has rarely been as entertaining.

Image quality on this Region One DVD from Image, released as part of their Mario Bava Collection, is unimpressive. While the film is presented in its original 1.66:1 aspect ratio, damage, grain and dirt are evident throughout.

Sound is not too good either. The theme music playing over the opening credits is clearly distorted and whilst things do improve somewhat after this, the audio continues to have a quiet, muffled quality that means one must make an effort.

On the extras front, there are informative liner notes from Tim Lucas, a concise biography and filmography for the director and a small gallery of posters, stills and lobby cards. Unusually, however, there are no trailers.

The relative paucity of the extras combined with the poor quality of the A/V materials is a real shame given the qualilties of the film itself, and I would think long and hard before purchasing this disc over the double-feature budget release that pairs the film with Anatomy of a Psycho.