The late, great Italian master of horror Mario Bava was incapable of making a dull-movie, and several of his late sixties giallo have a real touch of Hitchcock. Opening with a POV monologue from a dapper killer John Harrington (John Forsythe) that sounds like a scene from Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, Hatchet For The Honeymoon balances an earnest police procedural thriller with an elaborate phantasmagoria of the disintegration of a killer’s mind, as Harrington struggles to keep his murderous hands of clients at his bridal shop while harboring dark thoughts towards his nagging wife (Pasolini’s muse Laura Betti, giving vent to her frowsy side). Bava’s imaginative framings and mind-bending colour-coding of images is given full reign, and despite the lack of gore, Hatchet For The Honeymoon is a tart, astringent thriller in the vein of Psycho.
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