Hoo boy, is this cut a mess. Recently, the one true and original (read: “Austin”) Alamo Drafthouse weekly Terror Tuesday feature screened Creepers, aka the original botched American cut of Dario Argento’s Phenomena, which was trimmed from the full running time of 116 minutes to 86(!). Host Joe Ziemba defended this decision, made by a guest programmer, by noting that this was the cut that he had been raised on. This wasn’t really uncommon at the time, as films were cut both for content and length. I managed to come away with a few treasures from a recent VHS Swap Meet that was held in conjunction with Fantastic Fest, including Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia and what appears to be a Rapture preparedness video (I’m saving that one for last), but I also ended up with a heavily butchered (no pun intended) copy of a Mario Bava film that was originally titled Il rosso segno della follia (literally translated as The Red Sign of Madness), released by Charter Entertainment, a home video company that doesn’t even have a Wikipedia page (although there is an extensive library of their covers online). Their edition utilizes the title Hatchet for a Honeymoon, which isn’t consistent with the translated title, the film’s Wikipedia page (which calls it Hatchet for the Honeymoon), or the film’s listing on IMDb (which calls it A Hatchet for the Honeymoon). It’s also not consistent with the film itself, which features a cleaver and exactly zero hatchets.

John Harrington (Stephen Forsyth) is a dressmaker, specializing in wedding dresses and negligees: everything a woman might need for her wedding day—and night. He is also quite mad, as he explains in his opening voiceover; according to the film’s Wikipedia page, he also explains in this monologue that he has an Oedipus Complex and is impotent, but this isn’t in the Charter release outside of subtext throughout the film that would make much more sense with this inclusion. He is married to an “older” woman, Mildred (Laura Betti), with whom he has an openly antagonistic relationship despite the fact that she has funded his fashion house and also flatly refuses to give him the divorce he so desperately desires. Their morning breakfast is interrupted by Inspector Russell (Jesús Puente), who is still trying to learn the fate of three of Harrington’s models suddenly disappeared on their wedding nights; Harrington, of course, reveals in his continuing interior monologue that all three women are currently buried in his hothouse. New model Helen Wood (Dagmar Lassander) appears to take over as a model for the most recent victim, and Harrington is impressed by her moxie and intelligence, but he is distracted when model Alice (Femi Benussi) announces that she will have to leave the business, as she too is marrying. Harrington takes her to his creepy secret vault, in which dozens of mannequins wear various wedding dresses, and tells her to pick the one she wants to wear on her happy day. As soon as she tries one on, however, he hacks into her with his cleaver (again, not a hatchet) and cremates her body in his hothouse furnace and spreads her ashes about as mulch. We also learn that Harrington watched his own mother being murdered as a child, and that he thinks that by killing other women he will be able to acquire all the pieces of this puzzle in order to make sense of his past

Mildred announces that she will visit a sick relative, leaving Harrington alone for a week. He takes advantage of this opportunity to romance Helen, but when he returns home after a night out, Mildred is waiting for him, announcing that she has no intention of ever letting him out of her sight, and that he has failed her test. In a fit of rage, Harrington kills her moments before the inspector arrives with the late Alice’s fiance in tow, demanding to know Alice’s whereabouts and what all the screaming was about. Harrington convinces them that the noises were from the television and they depart, suspicious but empty-handed. Of course, this is when things get really strange: Harrington now finds himself followed by Mildred’s ghost everywhere he goes, but in a twist, it’s not Harrington who sees her specter, but everyone else, other than in the moment when she tells him the rules of this new un-living arrangement, in which he will never be free of her.

Here’s where things actually get interesting, as a heretofore fairly standard, if barely comprehensible, giallo proto-slasher takes on a bizarre supernatural element. Much like our most recent Movie of the Month The Pit mixes together conflicting horror: the psychological horror of having witnessed a murder as a child and not knowing who was responsible; the standard slasher horror of a murderer who fetishizes something and seeks particular victims because of it; and, finally, a strangely gothic ghost story straight out of the 1800s. It’s got everything! Even with all the cuts to the film, this twist happens too late, as it’s the most interesting thing to happen. Harrington even goes so far as to dig up Mildred to make sure she’s dead and then cremating her like his other victims, then trying to get rid of said ashes multiple times. The best scenes follow this, like Harrington tossing the ash-filled valise out, only to have it show back up in his house, or when he takes the bag of ashes with him to a bar and the waiter patiently waits for Mildred’s spirit, which Harrington and the audience cannot see, to place an order. Harrington also tries to throw the ashes out in the middle of a rainstorm, and it’s pure poetry.  The reversal of the normal “only you can see me” ghost story trope is surprisingly fresh, and it’s a shame that it’s stuck in this otherwise mediocre movie.

Of course, even a bad Bava is still Bava, so there are some visuals that are at turns intriguing and gorgeous, despite the lack of depth in character and storytelling. The vault in which Harrington keeps his mannequins, all adorned with wedding dresses, is a sight to behold both for its creepiness and ethereal beauty. When we see flashbacks to the young Harrington sneaking out of bed to figure out what’s wrong with his mother, he pulls his lacy white blanket over his head and it trails behind him like a bridal dress train, which makes for some lovely visual symmetry. There’s even a Psycho-esque scene in which Harrington tries to evict the inspector from his home before he notices the hand hanging over the upstairs banister, slowly dripping blood onto the carpet below. Strangely enough, I had just seen Phantom Thread in the morning before watching this film at night; not only are they thematically similar in that each film revolves around a European dressmaker whose bridal gowns are renowned and play a pivotal role in the story before his wife enforces behavioral changes through drastic means, but there’s even a scene in which the married couple eat breakfast passive aggressively, right down to the scraping of burnt toast.

The average movie viewer won’t find much to love here, but if you’re a Bava fan, there’s enough visual magic to offset the unimpressive screenplay and distracting histrionics of the lead. It’s not a Halloween classic, but for a completist, it’s worthwhile.

-Mark “Boomer” Redmond