Do you need to love, trust and care about the hero of the movie? Mario Bava is here with Hatchet for the Honeymoon in an attempt to craft a story where the hero is the absolute worst person in the entire film.Meet John Harrington. He's 30, runs a bridal dress factory, lives in a gorgeous villa near Paris and kills young women to overcome his impotence and Oedipus complex. His wife, Mildred, refuses to divorce him. And he's instantly smitten with Helen (Dagmar Lassander, Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, House by the Cemetery), a young model who has come to replace a missing girl.Why is she missing? Well, take it from Alice. She was one of the models at the salon who John took a liking to, giving her one of his dresses for her wedding. The moment she tried it on, he hacked her up with a meat cleaver, burned her corpse and used it to fertilize the plants in his greenhouse.Inspector Russell knows that something isn't quite right. After all, how can six models disappear from the same dress company? If only there was some evidence.John, however, is falling in love with Helen. And he finally decides to do something about his wife. That something entails him putting on a wedding dress and killing her. But there's one problem. Here's where Bava twists the film from giallo into supernatural territory: she won't stay dead.While John can't see or hear his wife, everyone else can. Even after burning her remains and placing them in a handbag, she keeps coming back. He takes the handbag with him to a club, where an attempt to bring another woman home fails when she sees his wife. Beaten by a bouncer and ejected, he cannot even use his charms to win over women. He throws his wife's ashes into the night, but she remains with himIf John can't be happy, at least he can murder Helen. He convinces her to wear a wedding dress and tells her that he never wanted to hurt her. She avoids the final blow of his cleaver, which unlocks a flashback where we learned the truth: John loved his mother and that love grew as he became the man of the house after his father's death. But when she remarried - and started having sex again - he couldn't take it and murdered her and her new husband. His mind erased the evidence until now. Helen was an undercover cop all along, leading Inspector Russell and his men back to arrest John. While being transported to prison, he's happy knowing that his many trials are over. Then, to his horror, he sees the handbag and notices his wife sitting next to him. Now, he's the only person who can see her. She promised to be with him forever, even in Hell. He goes insane before accepting his fate.Hatchet for the Honeymoon predates the slasher, yet many of its conventions can be found here and in other early Bava works. This film is a masterwork of both style and substance, with gorgeous fashion, sets and camerawork creating a gorgeous tableau. I love the scene where John uses Bava's Black Sunday, playing on the TV, as an excuse for the screams that come from his apartment. And as his wife's blood drips down onto the ground floor, it's almost as if Bava dares you to empathize with a hero who is completely contemptable. What a predictament to be in!

John Harrington runs a model agency specialising in bride gowns. He likes model railways and occasionally dressing up as a bride. The latter means he's in killer mode doing what he must do or, as he puts it, 'continue to wield the cleaver' until his 'issues' are resolved. The title suggests a similarity to Leonard Kastle's The Honeymoon Killers but in reality the films are far apart. Kastle's film is gritty, almost documentary-like and contains the massive presence of Shirley Stoler, while Bava opts for a style flamboyant even by giallo standards and has a handsome cast to match.The spirit of Psycho looms large, though Bava's lightness of touch offsets the potentially gruesome subject matter - there's a very funny scene in a kitsch disco (with terrific music) where the cleaver wielder is thrown out for suggesting a threesome involving one of the dancers and his dead wife. It's true to say that it's style over substance, but that's the point

Blood Brides starts on a high speed train late one night as a newly married woman still wearing wedding dress is brutally murdered by John Harrington (Stephen Forsythe), Harrington co-owns & runs a fashion house that specialises in designing & making bridal wear for weddings. Harrington is a self confessed paranoiac & is quite mad, he murders his best customers on their wedding night for bitter & twisted motives but the police are getting closer, Inspector Russell (Jesús Puente) suspects that Harrington is a serial killer of newly married women but lacks the proof to arrest him. As Harrington slips further into madness & decides to murder his overbearing wife Mildred (Laura Betti) the police edge closer & soon Harrington finds himself haunted by his terrible crimes...Also known as An Axe for the Honeymoon (which is the original Italian titles literal translation) & maybe most widely Hatchet for the Honeymoon this Italian & Spanish co-production was photographed, written & directed by Mario Bava & is apparently considered a bit of a classic amongst his fans but I have to say Blood brides didn't do anything for me & I found it rather pointless. The script starts off like a murder mystery as a meat cleaver wielding killer dispatches a blushing bride on a train but that soon gets dropped as the killers identity is revealed almost immediately at which point Blood Brides becomes a psychological thriller in the vein of American Psycho (2000) complete with ever increasingly bizarre voice overs from the killer & then ends up as a supernatural ghost story as maybe or maybe not the ghost of Harrington's dead wife pops up to torment him. I can't say I liked Blood Brides at all, I found it rather rather dull & pedestrian as well as not making that much sense. There are some silly moments, some really dumb character's & a story that never really appealed to me. At almost 90 minutes long Blood Brides drags at times with long stretches where next to nothing happens & even the so-called twist ending is weak that is basically a rip-off of Psycho (1960) with yet more Mother related madness. I just don't get all the love for this but each to their own I suppose & as long as I don't have to sit through it again I ain't that bothered who likes it...With very little in the way of actual suspense or plot I suspect that Bava was more interested in the visuals here than the narrative, sure there are some surreal moments & a few memorable images but even then I wouldn't call Blood Brides visually stunning or even particularly striking. There's no real blood or gore here, a bit of blood splatter & that's about it. The camera spins, goes out of focus, films from unusual angles & whatever else Bava decided to do to try & make banal scenes stand out & have some sort of deep metaphorical meaning that personally I just couldn't buy into. The film that is shown on telly is Bava's own Black Sabbath (1963) while the Spanish villa where the majority of Blood Brides is set was once owned by Spanish dictator Generalissimo Francisco Franco.Filmed in Barcelona in Spain, Paris in France & Rome in Italy this looks nice enough & was apparently filmed late 1968 but not released until 1970. The film is dubbed into English so it's always hard to judge the acting, it seems alright.Blood Brides, or whatever title you see it under, is a strange psychological thriller that I would struggle to even class as horror & with boring character's & a predictable story I wasn't that impressed. Also, why is a hatchet referred to in the title when Harrington's weapon of choice is more like a meat cleaver?

I was extremely surprised with the quality of this film. Mario Bava has created a flawless production. His use of colour is second to none. The sets and lighting are also top notch, conveying an eerie mood. Some lovely point of view shots are also utilized by Bava.This film tells the story of John Harrington, who runs a fashion house specialising in bridal wear. He is unhappily married to his overbearing wife Mildred and he is also insane.I would hesitate to call this a Giallo movie as the killer is revealed at the beginning of the film. This is more of a character study of the killer and his journey into madness.For those interested in thrillers and atmosphere this comes highly recommended. Far better than Bavas better known Bay of Blood, which i found rather cheap looking in comparison.This is a classic of Italian cinema. Highly recommended.