A change of pace and perspective in the giallo genre, Hatchet for the Honeymoon forgoes the usual limp mystery about who the real killer is and instead chooses to have the killer tell us his story. It’s a smart move because it means the movie can concentrate on the most interesting character and be mercifully light with the screen time of types like the nosy Italian cop, the nosy relatives of the victims, and nosy reporters. Instead of one of these morons trying to solve the big case, you’ve got the killer on a journey of self discovery.

John Harrington needs to keep killing off brides until he can fit the last piece into the puzzle that has permeated his life: What happened to his mommy when he was a little? Who killed her? Why?

Um, you did. With a meat cleaver. Probably because you thought she was a slut or something. I would think that the killer’s perfectly feathered hair and saucer-sized sweat stains under his pits would have given that away.

John opens things up by taking a train ride with some newlyweds and his meat cleaver. In all the movies with meat cleavers that I’ve watched, I would have to say that John’s meat cleaver is definitely the shiniest. Whatever else you might say about him, you can’t really dispute that he does a really nice job keeping it polished.

When not slaughtering newlyweds, John spends his down time running his own business where sells bridal gowns! It’s like my guidance counselor always told me: get a job where you have easy access to victims.

But all is not peaches and cream for our young, hunky psycho. Somehow he is married. Even though his hobby is killing chicks that get married, his own bride has escaped his wrath.

This is sort of surprising when you see her since she’s a hard faced nag who is constantly putting our hero down, saying stuff like “I’ll never give you divorce!” and “til death do us part.” She punctuates this with a sneer and at one point crushes a grape with great glee!

As if all this weren’t enough to tattoo “insert meat cleaver here” on her forehead, she also reminds Johnny that it is her money that is behind the success of his business and oh by the way my dead first husband was much better in the sack then you, bridal gown boy!

About this time, we get our first nosy copper hassling Johnny. They engage in a little witty repartee that you see in these bogus cat and mouse scenes in movies like this. You know, where the cop says something like, “this guy who kills these women must be crazy and not know what he is doing and he also probably is a big smelly jerk!” Then the killer says something like this: “well, maybe he has his reasons for killing chicks and they might be really good reasons, and I do not smell, it’s just that my deodorant gave out in this dang hothouse where dead broads are definitely not buried!”

Johnny finally does what any rational person would and kills his wife. But just then there is a knock at the door! It’s the nosy cop and the nosy fiancee of some woman that Johnny planted in his hothouse!

They shake him down for awhile and we all hold our breath and hope that these two don’t notice the dead body upstairs (her arm is hanging through the banister) and the blood that is dripping from above onto the carpet.

Director Mario Bava (Black Sabath, Baron Blood) gets a good shot of Johnny noticing the reflection of his wife’s body in the coffee table they’re all standing around. They don’t notice and the cop leaves, but not before telling Johnny that it is a very cold night, but that Johnny seems to be sweating. Yeah, he knows about that little problem! Why do you have to keep shoving his handicap in his face?

With his wife finally dead, Johnny can go about the business of being a full fledged psycho. This involves him cremating his wife’s remains and hauling them around in a nice leather valise. He manages to get himself thrown out of a bar when he hits on a woman there with his briefcase and refers to it as his wife!

Johnny then imagines that everyone is talking to his wife and that they can all see her but him! He chucks the bag into the river, but the bag mysteriously returns!

Following the killer as he goes through his daily routine (kill skank, hate wife, kill skank, kill skank wife I hate) allows the viewer to better connect with him and while not rooting for him (except for killing his wife) you are able to put all the killings into some kind of context so that the movie doesn’t just degenerate into a body count movie like Bava’s Bay of Blood.

Bava makes good use of changes in music as well as shooting everything from John’s subjective reality to illustrate the mess mental illness makes of people’s perceptions. Johnny believes that killing all these people will allow him some peace, but instead it plunges him into a new hell – a hell where he has to live with the fact that it was he that killed his mother. For this unredeemable act, he sentences himself to the worst kind of punishment possible – an eternity with the woman that he hates the most.

Mario succeeds in twisting the genre around, taking us inside the damaged brain of John, asking us not to unravel the crime, but to watch an unraveled man rage against his mental imbalance until he has spent his fury and is confined to the one rubber room he can never escape – that same damaged brain.

© 2009 MonsterHunter