EDITOR’S NOTE: Hatchet for the Honeymoon was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, April 30, 1977 at 11:30 p.m. It also aired on March 8, 1980 and August 8, 1981.

Do you need to love, trust and care about the hero of the movie? Mario Bava is here with Hatchet for the Honeymoon in an attempt to craft a story where the hero is the absolute worst person in the entire film.

Meet John Harrington. He’s 30, runs a bridal dress factory, lives in a gorgeous villa near Paris and kills young women to overcome his impotence and Oedipus complex. His wife, Mildred, refuses to divorce him. And he’s instantly smitten with Helen (Dagmar Lassander, Forbidden Photos of a Lady Above Suspicion, The House by the Cemetery), a young model who has come to replace a missing girl.

Why is she missing? She was one of the models at the salon who John took a liking to, giving her one of his dresses for her wedding. The moment she tried it on, he hacked her up with a meat cleaver, burned her corpse and used it to fertilize the plants in his greenhouse.

Inspector Russell knows that something isn’t quite right. After all, how can six models disappear from the same dress company? If only there was some evidence…

John, however, is falling in love with Helen. And he finally decides to do something about his wife. That something entails him putting on a wedding dress and killing her. But there’s one problem. Here’s where Bava twists the film from giallo into supernatural territory: she won’t stay dead.

While John can’t see or hear his wife, everyone else can. Even after burning her remains and placing them in a handbag, she keeps coming back. He takes the handbag with him to a club, where an attempt to bring another woman home fails when she sees his wife. Beaten by a bouncer and ejected, he cannot even use his charms to win over women. He throws his wife’s ashes into the night, but she remains with him

If John can’t be happy, at least he can murder Helen. He convinces her to wear a wedding dress and tells her that he never wanted to hurt her. She avoids the final blow of his cleaver, which unlocks a flashback where we learned the truth: John loved his mother and that love grew as he became the man of the house after his father’s death. But when she remarried — and started having sex again — he couldn’t take it and murdered her and her new husband. His mind erased the evidence until now.

Helen was an undercover cop all along, leading Inspector Russell and his men back to arrest John. While being transported to prison, he’s happy knowing that his many trials are over. Then, to his horror, he sees the handbag and notices his wife sitting next to him. Now, he’s the only person who can see her. She promised to be with him forever, even in Hell. He goes insane before accepting his fate.

Hatchet for the Honeymoon predates the slasher, yet many of its conventions can be found here and in other early Bava works. This film is a masterwork of both style and substance, with gorgeous fashion, sets and camerawork creating a gorgeous tableau. I love the scene where John uses Bava’s Black Sunday, playing on the TV, as an excuse for the screams that come from his apartment. And as his wife’s blood drips down onto the ground floor, it’s almost as if Bava dares you to empathize with a hero who is completely contemptible. What a predicament to be in!

This is part of the Nightmare Theater TV package, which also included Damiano Damiani’s The Witch, José Antonio Nieves Conde’s Marta, John Farris’ Dear Dead Delilah, Raúl Artigot’s The Witches Mountain, José María Zabalza’s The Fury of the Wolfman, Peter Sadsy’s Doomwatch, Francisco Lara Polop’s Murder Mansion, Carlos Aured’s Horror Rises from the Tomb and The Mummy’s Revenge, Joe D’Amato’s Death Smiles on a Murderer, Claudio Guerí’s The Bell from Hell and Amando de Ossorio’s The Night of the Sorcerers. Chiller Theater showed every single one of them.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Marta was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, May 14, 1977 at 11:30 p.m. It also aired on March 22, 1989 and August 1, 1981. I can’t even imagine what people thought when it was on, as this is one of the strangest movies and one that I absolutely love.

Marisa Mell is the female George Eastman. No, she doesn’t act like a wide-eyed gigantic maniac in every movie. It’s just that no matter what movie she appears in, just her name being in the credits guarantees that I will watch the film.

Also known as …dopo di che, uccide il maschio e lo divora (…After That, It Kills the Male and Devours It), which is one of the best titles ever.

A wealthy landowner named Don Miguel (Stephen Boyd, who was in Ben-Hur) is haunted by his dead mother and missing wife — who may have been murdered — when he meets a gorgeous runaway named Marta (Mell), who may have killed the man who she was running from.

I haven’t seen any of José Antonio Nieves Conde’s films before, but this movie makes me want to watch every single one of them.

The strange thing is that this movie pretty much became true in a way, as Boyd and Mell fell in love, as they made this and The Great Swindle one on top of the other*. Despite Boyd not wanting anything to do with Mell at first — was the man made of stone? — he eventually fell for her and they married in a gypsy ceremony near Madrid, cutting their wrists and sealing their blood. The couple was so possessed by the mystical and sexual desire they felt for one another that they even went to have it exorcized in another ritual.

Boyd had to run from her, as the relationship physically and mentally exhausted him. As for Mell, she’d tell the Akron Beacon Journal that “We both believe in reincarnation, and we realized we’ve already been lovers in three different lifetimes, and in each one I made him suffer terribly.”

In the same year that all this happened, Mell was also dating Pier Luigi Torri, an aristocratic nightclub owner who fled the country after a cocaine scandal. Arrested in London after it was discovered he had a $300 million dollar gold mine and had also scammed a bank, he somehow escaped his jail cell and ran from the police across rooftops, escaping to America for 18 months. Evidently, Mell dated Diabolik in art and in life.

So let’s talk about the Mell relationship in the film instead of reality. She has come to live with Miguel, who collects insects and has two servants who keep things tidy. She enters his life by claiming that she is on the run for a self-defense murder. Miguel decides to protect her from the police because she looks like his wife Pilar (also played by Mell) who has left him or was killed. He’s also tormented by the death of his sainted mother while she may not be who she says that she is.

Oh yeah — and now Marta is acting as Pillar to throw the police off the scent of the man whom she either wants to marry or destroy.

Marta is a gothic-style giallo but is also dreamlike throughout. There’s a continual obsession with placing Mell in front of mirrors. And for someone who was rarely used outside of her sex appeal in films, she absolutely haunting here. Somehow, Spain put this movie forward for Oscar consideration and if I ran those popcorn fart boring awards, I would have given this every single award.

Sure, this movie rips off Hitchcock, but it also wallows in sin, which is what I demand from the giallo that I come to adore. Somehow, someway, this aired on broadcast TV as part of Avco Embassy’s Nightmare Theater package, along with A Bell from Hell, Death Smiles on a Murderer, Maniac Mansion, Night of the Sorcerers, Fury of the Wolfman, Hatchet for the Honeymoon, Horror Rises from the Tomb, Dear Dead Delilah, Doomwatch, Witches Mountain, The Mummy’s Revenge and The Witch. Man, how did any of those air on regular TV?

*Credit to the Stephen Boyd Fan Page and Marisa Mell: Her Life and Her Work for this information.

EDITOR’S NOTE: The Undead was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, October 10, 1964 at 1 a.m. It also aired on February 3, 1968; October 14, 1973; March 30, 1974; May 10, 1975; May 28, 1977 and October 23, 1982.

In the mid-1950s, reincarnation was in and The Search for Bridey Murphy was being made, so Roger Corman asked Charles Griffith to write a script, which was originally called The Trance of Diana Love, which is a great title, and was to be in all iambic pentameter.

Griffith said, “I separated all the different things with sequences with the devil, which were really elaborate, and the dialogue in the past was all in iambic pentameter. Roger got very excited by that. He handed the script around for everybody to read, but nobody understood the dialogue, so he told me to translate it into English. The script was ruined.”

I can’t even add up how many wasted hours that was.

Mel Welles, who played Smolkin, told Interviews with B Science Fiction and Horror Movie Makers: Writers, Producers, Directors, Actors, Moguls and Makeup, “It was a wonderful script and it probably would have been the cult film rather than Little Shop of Horrors had it been shot that way. But either Roger or someone at American-International Pictures didn’t think it was commercially viable to do it that way and at the last minute a decision was made to rewrite the script without that.”

Quintus Ratcliff (Val DuFour) is a psychic researcher who has spent years in Tibet to learn how to mentally regress someone back into their past life. He wants to prove to an old professor that he can do this, so he hires Diana Love (Pamela Duncan) for $500 to place her into a trance for two days.

She’s soon back in the Middle Ages, trapped in the mind of her ancestor Helene, accused of witchcraft. Diana is able to inform her past self of how to escape, so she heads into the night and meets up with the real witch Livia (Allison Hayes) and even Satan himself (Richard Devon).

Using the link between Diana and Helene, Quintus comes back in time, hoping to convince Helene to avoid her death and change history.

With Billy Barty as an imp and Dick Miller as a leper, this Corman film may have been a cheap one — and one that caused him stress with the bad smelling fog and budget issues — but it’s a fun idea well told. You can’t even tell that it was shot inside a supermarket.

This movie is where The Misfits got the artwork for their album Evilive. You can learn more about the horror film influences of The Misfits here.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Gigi (Lucy Barrett) never knew her mother or father, raising herself with the help of her roommate and longtime best friend Rachel (Phoenix Best). She makes most of her money running scams, like stealing video games and selling them to kids whose parents don’t allow them to get them.

This all changes when she figures out that her mother might be Linda (Tiffany Kyle), the owner of Fusefire, the biggest video game company in the world. But to get closer to her mother, she has to lie and scheme and get close to her assistant Blair (Jillian Kinsey) and deal with the sexual threats of her stepbrother Vincent (Brandon Mitchell).

Directed by Tamar Halpern (Her Affair to Die For), this movie is not The Assistant, which is also a Tubi original. It does have Gigi going all out to get revenge, as well as discussion of video games that feels like your grandmother wrote it: “The touch screen controls are now more intuitive.” as well as “No one watches the cut scenes.” Someone spent five minutes on Reddit for that line.

You can watch this on Tubi.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Attack of the Puppet People was first on Chiller Theater on Saturday, September 26, 1964 at 11:15 p.m. It also aired on July 31, 1965 and February 18, 1967.

With the totally awesome working titles The Fantastic Puppet People and I Was a Teenage Doll, as well as the provocative UK title Six Inches Tall, this Bert I. Gordon auteur project — he wrote, directed and produced — was rushed into theaters by AIP to capitalize on the success of the previous year’s The Incredible Shrinking Man. It was paired with War of the Colossal Beast, which is ironic, as this film features that movie’s first installment, The Amazing Colossal Man.

Mr. Franz (John Hoyt, who was in everything from Cleopatra to Flesh Gordon) owns a doll factory and seems quite nice, but the lifelike dolls stored in glass canisters — his special collection — seem quite odd. That’s because they’re all real people transformed into dolls!

June Kennedy (Teenage Doll, Sorority Girl and the incredibly named The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent) plays Sally Reynolds, who takes a job with Mr. Franz. Before long, she’s gotten all into salesman Bob Westley(John Agar, who has a vast career from John Wayne films to tons of B movies and science fiction films all the way to Miracle Mile; he was also the first husband of Shirley Temple), which seems to upset her boss. Before long, the guy is gone — just when they were about to get engaged and move away!

Soon, the twosome finds themselves part of Franz’s doll collection, forced to act out Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Keep an eye out for Laurie Mitchell (who played Queen Yllana, the ruler of Venus, in Queen of Outer Space) and Susan Gordon, the daughter of the director. She’s also in his films Tormented and Picture Mommy Dead.

This movie is part of American history, believe it or not. On the evening of June 17, 1972, Alfred C. Baldwin III (in a nearby hotel as a lookout for the Watergate burglars) became so interested in the film that he didn’t notice the two plainclothes detectives who made the historic arrests that led to the event known as Watergate.

You can watch this with Rifftrax commentary on Tubi. You can also get the Shout! Factory blu ray release with a 2K scan if you’d like.