Format: Streaming video from Tubi TV on Fire!
One of the things that made Peeping Tom such a transgressive movie is the fact that we know immediately who the killer is. The rest of the movie then attempts to get the audience to sympathize with someone who they know to be a murderer. Hatchet for the Honeymoon does half of this. It tells us exactly who the killer is in the opening few minutes, and then honestly doesn’t care if we sympathize or not. It’s more about how things play out than it is about us caring about whether or not the psychotic killer survives or gets what he wants.
So it’s absolutely not a spoiler when I tell you that when we are introduced to John Harrington (Stephen Forsyth) and he immediately tells us that he is a psychopath responsible for the murder in the opening scene of the film. What he tells us is that he suffered some terrible childhood trauma, and for some reason, when he murders a bride with a cleaver (and it’s definitely a cleaver and not a hatchet), he gets a glimpse of that trauma and gets closer to remembering exactly what happened.
So, it’s certainly a benefit to him that when his mother died, she left him a bridal dress factory in Paris. While this gives him plenty of access to the brides he likes to murder, he relies on his wife Mildred (Laura Betti) for his finances. Their marriage is sort of one of convenience and aggression; she refuses to grant John a divorce, telling him that he will always be connected to her.
John, of course, is a cinematic killer, meaning that he does so in a way that is guaranteed to get him caught or killed by the end of the film. Essentially, when one of his models announces that she is getting married, he hacks her to death, throws her body in his furnace, and then uses the ashes in his greenhouse. It’s fair to wonder why his models continue to announce when they get killed for making the announcement. Naturally, he’s being investigated by the local police, led by Inspector Russell (Jesús Puente), but the police can’t seem to pin anything on him despite the fact that he’s lost five models recently.
It's worth noting that when he does kill a woman, John is granted a slightly clearer vision of whatever trauma he suffered as a youth. This doesn’t mean that he gets anything like an actually clear view of the event, but that’s the point, isn’t it? We’re supposed to be simultaneously horrified by his actions, but interested to see what he sees in his visions. Meanwhile, a new model named Helen Wood (Dagmar Lassander) applies to work for John and his suddenly disappeared models, and naturally John is going to fall for her. Just as this relationship is taking off, Mildred reappears from a faked vacation, hoping to catch him in the act. John instead goes the psychotic killer route, dons a wedding dress, and kills his wife.
The problem is that Mildred doesn’t seem to want to stay dead. John keeps seeing her, and much more upsetting to him, other people seem to see her as well. So can he get rid of her? Can John figure out what happened to him years ago? Will the police catch up to him? Will you care enough to make it through the third act to find out the answers to these questions?
Hatchet for the Honeymoon has a few basic problems. One is clearly the fact that John uses a cleaver to do his killing and not a hatchet, but Cleaver for the Honeymoon isn’t nearly as catchy a title. The bigger problem is that the tactic of revealing the killer is one that has to be used carefully. It’s easy for this to backfire, and for me, it backfires completely in this film.
The reason that it works in Peeping Tom is that we do ultimately care about Mark and what he is going through. He becomes a sympathetic character over the course of the movie, and we as the audience may not like the fact that he is a crazed murderer, we still don’t necessarily want anything bad to happen to him. That’s not the case with John. He’s essentially an unlikable character from the jump. I didn’t really care what his trauma was, what his visions were going to lead to, or if he every got any resolution for them.
Honestly, there are a lot of people who will likely enjoy this more than I did. With such an unlikable person at the center of it, though, I couldn’t be bothered to care about it.
Why to watch Hatchet for the Honeymoon: It’s one of those rare movies that tells you who the villain is from the top.
Why not to watch: Virtually every other movie that does this is more interesting.
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