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A strange blend of giallo, black comedy and ambiguous ghost story/tale of madness, Mario Bava's HATCHET FOR THE HONEYMOON (1969) is quite an entertaining trifle.

John Harrington (Stephen Forsyth) knows he's insane. In voice-over, he explains that although initially the realization disturbed him, he has come to find it amusing. And you will, too.

Harrington is a designer of wedding dresses with an insufferably shrewish wife, Mildred (Laura Betti) and a very unpleasant secret buried in his childhood, which drives him to murder women on their wedding nights while dressed in a wedding gown.

With his icy blue eyes and placid visage, Stephen Forsyth makes for an entertainingly laid-back maniac, betraying nary a whit of annoyance as his wife shrilly harangues him. In one scene, Harrington's emotional detachment is brilliantly expressed in a visual pun when he literally puts his wife at a distance by conversing with her at the breakfast table while looking at her through the wrong end of his binoculars.

The plotting is careless, what with a police inspector showing up at just the right moment at least three times too many, but Mario Bava's many visual and editing flourishes are so clever they're downright witty.

There's a remarkable transition where the camera pans across a line of mannequin heads that seem to float against the black background of a darkened room. The camera stops at the final head, which we realize with a start is not a mannequin but Harrington, and we hear a woman's voice speaking. There's a momentary sense of dizzying disorientation before the camera suddenly continues its pan and we see the woman speaking and realize that we're in a different scene now.

There's also a suspenseful scene worthy of Hitchcock at his best, where a single drop of blood poised to drop from a dead woman's hand threatens to expose Harrington while he's being questioned by the police.

Currently available on DVD from Image, the picture and sound quality is not in the same league as some of the other movies in their Bava Collection, such as BLACK SUNDAY or BLACK SABBATH, but it's safe to assume that Image did the best they could with the best source materials they could find.

Overall, perhaps not among Bava's very best films, but still more than worthwhile for those who appreciate imaginative, well-crafted horror.

– Garry Messick

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