Cold Fusion Video Reviews

aka Hatchet For a Honeymoon

• Directed by Mario Bava
• Written by Mario Bava, Santiago Moncada, and Mario Musy
• Starring
  • Femi Benussi
  • Laura Betti
  • Stephen Forsythe
  • Dagmar Lassander

It’s that time of year — when hearts turn to thoughts of romance, and thus the B-Masters Cabal turn to romance awry. Our elitist circle has amassed a group of reviews, each on the theme of “Tainted Love,” guaranteed to make you view the holiday with as much trepidation as any other. All reviews should be up and readable by 2/10/01.

• B-Notes reviews The Four-Sided Triangle
• Badmovies.org reviews Tromeo & Juliet
• Jabootu reviews Sincerely Yours
• Opposable Thumb Films reviews Nekromantik
• Stomp Tokyo reviews Demon Seed
• Teleport City reviews Green Snake
• The Bad Movie Report reviews The Curious Dr. Humpp
• And You Call Yourself a Scientist! reviews The Horrible Secret Of Dr Hichcock

And now, our feature presentation.

I ruffled some feathers with my mixed review of Planet of the Vampires a while back; somehow, it just didn’t raise in me the devotion and awe that Bava’s films are commonly reputed to raise. It was interesting and all, but it was hampered by unexcited pacing, overly stylized set design, and costumes which made everyone look alike. Those same people who took me to task may very well do so again here; if anything, this review is even more mixed.

And the first demerit comes with the opening credits: The music. Dear heavens, the music! It sounds like something you’d hear from a period “weeper” — something of high domestic drama concerning a terminal disease, full of flutes an harps. Yes, folks, this does continue for the whole movie, not only do these sunny-yet-vaguely-melancholy themes dominate far into scenes in which they are wildly inappropriate, but the belated transitions to the “scary” music (clashing chords on electric guitars) are so abrupt they sound like channel changes.

(While we’re talking about the opening credits, here’s a hint for foreign directors: Either have your credits done in your native language or, if you realy must have the credits in English, find a native speaker to write them. Not only do we have a “screemplay by” credit [and no, I don't think that's an attempt at Cryptkeeper-style humor], but the production was positively clogged with “assistants director,” “assistants producer,” “assistants manager,” etc. I felt very guilty succumbing to a case of the giggles.)

Into the movie, then. We first meet John Harrington (Stephen Forsythe), our handsome, thirty-year-old protagonist, as he’s doing a very naughty thing: dismembering a honeymooning couple with a meat cleaver in their private train car. Now, before you get a solid mental image of that, let me restrain you. This is Mario Bava, the director’s director. Every scene, every shot, is immaculately composed (as assured by the fact that he was his own director of photography). This scene does not rely on splatter and gross-outs; instead, great camera work sets up the kill, understatedly indicates it, and then finishes up with John cleaning his blade on her wedding veil. It may be a little more intense than you’d expect for a PG rating (remember the good old days?), but the message is clear here: Bava is not interested in showing dismemberment.

After such a, um, memorable introduction, we get to know John better in his voiceover, in which he cheerfully admits to being completely insane. (Thanks for the tip.) And marriages and weddings figure strongly in his life. For one thing, he runs a bridal fashion house which he inherited from his mother on her death. For another, his life is bounded by his own marriage to the wealthy Mildred (Laura Betti), with whom passion has run cold, but whose fortune has financed his business. For a third, he keeps a secret room where mannequins dressed in all of the Harrington House wedding gown designs wait for his tender, amorous advances. (Whooboy. Did I mention he’s insane?) For a fourth, all of the young women he murders (along with unlucky grooms, when present) have been killed on their wedding night — and have all been former models leaving his employee to get married. And for a fifth, his reason for the string of murders (as he remarks later to the police inspector, even madmen’s motives make perfect sense to them) is that each time he kills, he has a vision, a misty memory of a set of stairs and a screaming woman — memories of the night his own mother was murdered. Each time, the vision is that much clearer, and he’s driven to recover as much as he can about that night, both by his conscious mind and by the phantom of his young self who shows up periodically.

How’s that for a setup, boys and girls?

While this scenario sustains the first half of the movie, we then move abruptly to a parallel plot line: John finally kills his wife, who’s none too stable herself, and a devotee of spiritism; from that point forward, he finds that people around him see her spirit beside him and assume that they’re just out together as a couple. This despite the fact that John himself cannot see her, except in waking dreams, where she reiterates her earlier promise that she’d never grant a divorce, and that they’d be together forever. It’s a plotline very much in the EC Comics mold with a little twist, and it’s what breaks through the madly calm demeanor which John normally carries.

Watching this movie, I was reminded of accounts of Alfred Hitchcock working with screenwriter Ernest Lehman on North by Northwest. Initially, Hitchcock merely came to Lehman with a laundry list of scenes he’s always wanted to do: A man being chased by a biplane, a cat-and-mouse game on Mount Rushmore, etc. Lehman crafted a plot to hold the elements together, and Hitchcock and Lehman refined it together until it was filmable. Similarly here, there are literally dozens of shots and scenes in which it’s easy to speculate that Bava had the scenario set up just so he could do such and so a thing with the camera. A man passionately kissing one in a long line of mannequins. A conversation in which both participants are only scene as alternating reflections in the blade of a knife. Mechanical toys which all start winding down as a conversation becomes more ominous, and so on.

And I suppose, given that European cinema has always been less beholden to plot than American film, it should come as no surprise that the cookie dough which holds all of these chocolate chips is less substantive. The two main storylines are only perfunctorily meshed; it seems that once someone realized there wasn’t enough plot in the “wedding night killings” plotline to last for an entire feature, the “invisible wife” story was dropped into the script in a lump, until we come back to the “shocker” ending that is just a little too guessable. And given some of the obvious Hitchcock homages here (not only is our protagonist obsessed with his mother, but he kills his own wife while wearing a wedding veil), it’s interesting to speculate that this is exactly the kind of film Hitchcock would have made, had he chosen to be European director rather than a Hollywood director.

Some flaws in the film are probably due to the American distributor. While my Media Home Entertainment copy has the same 88 minute running time as is listed in the IMDb, there are some blatantly missing scenes, one being a wedding reception which is not seen but is mentioned later as if it had been shown. And I should probably note (since resisting the urge so long as almost given me a hernia) that there is not a single hatchet in evidence anywhere during those 88 minutes, John’s weapon of choice consistently being the meat cleaver.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 4
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 0
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0