Having cast the original giallo mold with Sei Donne Pour L'Asassino, the template for over one hundred more to follow, Maestro Bava hovers between serial sex murderer films and ghost stories with this stylish and lyrical ode to morbidity and necrophilia that begins as a killer-thriller and morphs almost seamlessly into a supernatural chiller. It's a leisurely, slow moving movie with several shocks that are given away in the film's poster. Bava inverts the giallo formula he created. Unlike the average Italian nero-thriller with its unknown protagonist, Hatchet begins with full disclosure of the killer's identity. His current killing spree is based on his childhood murder of his mother and her lover. a homicidal fury rooted in sexual rage and jealousy. As an adult he kills brides to recreate the sexual excitement he felt killing his mother and to remember why he kills. His slow remembrance in blurry flashback moments is a big part of the plot. It's also why he marries a woman who is more a nagging mother figure than a sexual partner, a companion for whom he has no physical need since he cannot perform as a man nor does he have the interest. This is pressed home by a séance scene early on in which his wife, a spiritist, channels his murdered mother. At the end of Psycho, Norman Bates tells the audience in a voice-over that he wouldn't hurt a fly. In the beginning of Hatchet, John Harrington coolly feeds a fly he's caught to his bird. He is a proto-metro-sexual, a macho GQ Man, a forerunner of American Psycho Patrick Bateman as others have pointed out. Arrogant and haughty, a pseudo-aristocrat so smug he practically caresses the door handle of the train compartment he exits after slaughtering a newlywed couple, covering it in fingerprints that the police seem to ignore. While his dandified behavior may seem familiar, there were no similar characters in any subsequent Bava movie. Santiago Moncada's Freudian-orientated script is very well thought out in a subtle manner while Bava seems to apply a few personal and recognizable brush strokes of his own: As in Sei Donne, the action centers around a fashion house and the victims are fashion models.(The concept of a psycho killer making love to female mannequins in a secret room also appears in Umberto Lenzi's Spasmo with Robert Hoffman.) The police are plodding and inert (again Sei Donne). The killer is tormented by the ghost of the victim or the hallucination of a ghost (The Whip and The Body).A murderous child is a prominent character as in Operation Fear, Bay of Blood and to a lesser extent in the Wurdulak episode of Black Sabbath. Bava's cinematography is alway wonderful but Hatchet does not have the photographic beauty or deep colors of Sei Donne, Planet of the Vampires or Black Sabbath. The main set piece is Harrington killing his wife. Faced with the prospect of a sexually needy wife, he goes berserk in a sexual panic, dons a bridal veil and applies lipstick, and in a perverted reversal of the wedding night, chases her around the bedroom and brutally chops her with his fetishized phallic weapon of choice, a cleaver (and not a hatchet, despite the US title). This scene is the most graphic and bloody yet extremely mild by giallo standards. The three other murders we see Harrington commit are very subdued compared to this, the gore and blood obscured by flashy visuals. That this film was rated PG with this kind of content once again proves that censors do not really think when they watch a film, fortunately, and look for only the most obvious moments but never grasp the sub-text. That's why Jess Franco movies got booked into Saturday kiddie matinees during the 1960s! After this murder, the film switches tracks completely and becomes a ghost story, with a twist. Harrington can't see his wife's ghost yet everyone else sees her. Or is he hallucinating? The audience sees her as a ghost, looking awfully spooky and creepy. Do the people around Harrington see her like this? Their behavior indicates that she looks normal to them. When he is finally arrested at the end, only he can see her spirit. Or is this a hallucination also, a manifestation of his madness? The original title "The Red Mark of Madness" is much better but lacked the punch distributors need to sell tickets. Instead of a bravura, violent, visually sensational ending that the audience expected from giallos, and one that Dario Argento would have provided, Bava ends on a low-key, crepuscular note. Overall, it's one of his best films and certainly underrated. Stephen Forsyth could have continued to make a lot of European films, he was better looking than most movie stars, but stopped because he did not like the roles being offered.
Review of Hatchet for the Honeymoon
