to Bava’s fleeting homage to Polanski, in which a classroom photo is briefly glimpsed in John’s private menagerie, showing his young face already shaded with dark abstraction.) It was distributed in Britain under the title Blood Brides, on the bottom half of a double-bill with The Creeping Flesh, starring Peter Cushing and Christo- pher Lee. It was reviewed for Monthly Film Bulletin by a condescending Robin Wood, who observed: “Mario Bava’s claim to attention arises prin- cipally from the fact that, since he usually photographs as well as directs his films, they are very consciously conceived in terms of the potentiali- ties of the camera and as a result are, in a somewhat crude sense, ‘cin- ematic.’ . . . The creation of elaborate effects through camera movement, stylized color, focus distortion and the use of varied lenses is, however, no guarantee of quality, and the effects in Blood Brides appear merely self- conscious and self-indulgent.”6
The
UK release of the film was reported as having a length of 93 minutes, 5 min- utes longer than the US release; it is not known if this count was inaccu- rate, or what the additional footage contains, if it indeed exists. The following year, the film was picked up by a fledgling American dis- tributor, GG Productions, whose one- sheet poster was an amateurish, crayon-scratched portrait of a green- faced bride with a V-shape cleaved out of her cranium. A second, superior, but untemptingly basic design of a clutching bloody hand replaced it, also without attracting many viewers. GGP sold its interests in the film one year later to Avco-Embassy Pictures, who immediately consigned it to a pack- age of 16 mm films bound for televi- sion . . . where it seldom showed up. Shortly after Avco-Embassy went bankrupt in 1982, Hatchet for the Honeymoon became unresistingly ab- sorbed in the US public domain, where it became unauthorized fodder for numerous home video labels. Of the many releases, Media Home Enter- tainment’s cassette was the best-look- ing, and the superb cover art deliv- ered the campaign the film could have
