Review: Hatchet for the Honeymoon

Stephen Forsyth plays a charming lady killer – literally, he kills beautiful young women, a task made easier by his bridal fashion business. Will pretty young Dagmar Lassander be yet another of this man’s victims? Laura Betti plays Forsyth’s harpy wife, whose constant berating and complaining are starting to form cracks in Forsyth’s outwardly seemingly fairly ‘normal’ persona that hides the monster within him.

 

Highly underrated mixture of giallo and “Peeping Tom”, this 1970 flick from Mario Bava (“Kill, Baby…Kill”, “Black Sunday”, “Black Sabbath”) is one of his most enjoyable. Interesting and seriously twisted, it offers up a really good lead performance by Canadian-born Stephen Forsyth, who is like a more charismatic, psycho John Philip Law or something. It was actually his last of 10 films (all in Italy) before he quit the business and went back to Canada to work in music and photography, apparently. His killer in this film is a mixture of handsome Ted Bundy-type and the character Karlheinz Boehm played in the classic “Peeping Tom”, good-looking but unhinged and creepy as hell. We get a voiceover narration from the character just to make it even more unsettling. There’s also a little bit of Norman Bates here with the character’s mummy issues, he even wears a wedding veil during one important murder. It’s funny, and presumably intentional (Bava even has a little fun referencing himself by showing “Black Sabbath” on a TV screen at one point. Cute). Special mention must go to Laura Betti for her extraordinary performance as Forsyth’s horribly shrill, shrewish wife. It gets more batshit insane as it goes along, with Forsyth carrying around a dead person’s ashes in a bag, yet when he interacts with people they seem to be seeing the person in human form, not their ashes in a bag. Hilarious. Did he really kill them? Is he hallucinating out of some kind of guilt/mania?

 

Bava does a great job being his own cinematographer – the film looks typically fantastic. The music score by Sante Maria Romitelli (“Top Sensation”, “God’s Gun”) is also top-notch. It was a troubled production and is certainly a flawed film. The central mystery isn’t remotely mysterious (I don’t just mean who the killer is – we know that immediately – but those flashbacks are a lot less mysterious than likely intended), and I don’t think Bava and screenwriter Santiago Moncada (“The Fourth Victim” with Carroll Baker) integrate the whole deal with Forsyth’s wife entirely well, despite Betti’s memorable performance. Apparently the character wasn’t in the original script but Bava decided to write the role when Betti expressed interest in the film. It kinda shows, actually. It turns things into an amusing Edgar Allen Poe-ish ghostly story, but one has to admit that it doesn’t make a great deal of logical sense. However, the flaws aren’t fatal, just a bit regrettable.

 

People sometimes cite Bava’s “A Bay of Blood” as the film to bridge the gap between “Psycho” (or “Peeping Tom” if you prefer that film) and the slasher originators like “Black Christmas” and “Halloween”. However, I think that film really only influenced the “Friday the 13th series, not the entire slasher genre itself. Instead, I think the giallo subgenre, including this twisted film probably played more of a role. A well-acted, good-looking, entertainingly macabre story, it’s a much better film than “A Bay of Blood”. Just a bit of a shame about the mystery, if done with a little less transparency this could’ve been a real masterwork instead of just good.

 

Rating: B-

 

 

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