Hatchet For The Honeymoon (1969)

Il Rosso Seno Della Follia / Hatchet For The Honeymoon (Italy 1969 84 min.) 
Directed by Mario Bava, written by Santiago Moncada


A fashion designer tormented by his sexual failings vents his frustrations by murdering the models for his range of wedding dresses. When he goes on to kill his own wife, she returns to plague him as a ghost. Mario Bava's horror, starring Stephen Forsyth, Dagmar Lassander, Laura Betti and Jesus Puente.

Dario Argento may be the accepted master of Italian horror film making but Mario Bava is the genre's supreme stylist. This compact film is littered with startling and beautifully composed shots.

The story begins as the sort of psychological thriller so beloved by makers of the giallo sub-genre in Italy through the late sixties and in to the mid seventies. However, around the half-way mark it warps into something entirely different, part-ghost story part paranoid thriller and there's a massive (literal) kink at one point as Forsyth's John Harrington dresses in a bridal gown and slaps on make-up prior to murdering his domineering wife (Laura Betti).

Along the way there's plenty of visual treats for the viewer. Look, for example at this superbly composed and lit still from the first act of the film :

It's part of an extended scene between Forsyth and an intended victim that revolves around the couple waltzing around a store room full of brides dresses that is shot using a near weightless camera to zoom in and around the couple, it's beautifully timed in such a way that, although we know what's coming, the suspense is built up and up until you feel that the moment of release can't be held off any longer. And then it is. A real tour de force and one of several that lift the film above the competent into the magical.

Or how about the scene where Harrington answers the door to the police moments after committing his most recent act of homicide? His still warm victim is bleeding to death on the staircase above the baronial style hallway where the men are talking. Blood drops form along the dangling fingers of the near-corpse and threaten to fall into the hall below, alerting the visiting coppers to the foul deed which has just taken place. Brilliantly handled with a real sense of tension and impending doom.

There's also a very clever use of a running motif of breakfast on the terrace of Harrington's mansion-style home. Twice we see them sitting down to a very formal meal with perfect table settings, a maid dancing attendance upon them as they plough through course after course of high-end food. Throughout Harrington reads his newspaper and attempts to totally ignore his nagging spouse.

Later in the film, after Harrington believes that he has removed his hated wife from his life forever. we see him once again at the breakfast table. The place settings lie in disarray, he has his feet up on the table and is happily guzzling down coffee and discarding the pages of his newspaper that he has read with relish and abandon, strewing them across the table and floor.

As a visual symbol of the physical and mental release he feels after freeing himself from the shackles of his loveless marriage it's very funny and is handled very skilfully by both director and actor.

Stephen Forsyth's Harrington can easily be seen as an ancestor of TV's Dexter, the seeming professional/ normal man with a hidden appetites explained by a childhood trauma and the 'killer in a dress' motif is a clear pre-echo of De Palma's Dressed To Kill (1980).

Visually arresting with an interesting script - the only downside being that (as usual) the film was badly dubbed into English rather than subtitled.