Hatchet for the Honeymoon

Hatchet for the Honeymoon

Genre: Giallo, Horror, Thriller, Psychological Horror

Original title: Il rosso segno della follia

AKA: Blood Brides / Red Wedding Night / The Red Mark of Madnes

Director: Mario Bava

Year: 1970

A bridal design shop owner kills various young brides-to-be in an attempt to unlock a repressed childhood trauma that's causing him to commit murder.

I was underwhelmed with this Mario Bava picture. For a giallo it's different as there is no real Who-Done-It, instead we spend the film with the character of John (an unconvincing Stephen Forsyth) as we see him struggle with his own sanity more and more as the film progresses, killing off women along the way. This kind of thing has been done brilliantly in films such as Psycho, Henry: Portrait Of A Serial Killer & Maniac, where the writers choose present us with more of a character study, whilst still offering kills, thrills & spills along the way. Here though, the plot is more geared toward what has caused John to behave this way & is delivered in a drawn out manor which is never as interesting as it should be. 

Mario Bava is an outstanding visual director, the kind that can make a bog standard scene feel alive, unfortunately my major problem with many of his pictures is that I've rarely found him to be a great story-teller. That element of his work always seems to be secondary behind the visuals & this kind of plot suffers in a big way because of it. 

The film does have it's moments though, there's a fantastic scene where John has just killed a women on the top of the stairs & two suspicious investigators come in & start questioning him about some screaming they've heard. Blood begins to slowly drip down the dead womens arm, through her fingers, then slowly drops down the stairs making a gentle splashing sound, this happening closely to where the police are questioning John. The tension built here is really fantastic. That added with a really fantastic score by Sante Maria Romitelli that is used to great effect in the film from the beautiful piece on the opening credits to the briliant loud electric guitar when John's character makes a turn for the worse, it's almost reminiscent of Harmonica's theme in Once Upon A Time In The West how it hits you out of nowhere.

Overall, quite an average Bava picture that I'd only recommend to Gialli obsessives or Bava completests.

Rating: ★★½