Hatchet for the Honeymoon 1970

John Harrington is a handsome, 30-year-old man who feels compelled to murder young brides to remember details of a childhood trauma, a dark impulse embodied by Gorca (archive footage). He lives in a spacious villa outside Paris, where he runs a bridal dress factory owned by his deceased mother and financed by his wife Mildred Harrington. He and [Mildred Harrington] are ill-matched, but she refuses to consider divorce. Whenever he hears that one of the models at the dress factory is about to marry, he hacks her to death with a meat cleaver while she is wearing her bridal gown, then burns the body in the furnace of his greenhouse and uses the ashes as fertilizer. Each murder gives him a slightly clearer image of his trauma. Inspector Russell frequently drops by to question him about the six models who have disappeared, but with a lack of hard evidence, cannot arrest him.

In his office, John meets Helen Wood, who has come to apply for the job vacated by one of the mysteriously disappeared models. Impressed by her wit and beauty, John hires her. Over the next few days, John falls in love with Helen. After dropping Mildred off at the airport for a weeklong vacation, he takes Helen out to dinner. He returns to find Mildred at home; she reveals that the vacation was a ruse, and she took the next flight back in hopes of catching him in the act of infidelity. Feeling entrapped by Mildred’s constant presence, he dons a wedding gown and hacks her to death with the cleaver. He buries her in the grounds of the greenhouse.

Everyone John speaks to sees Mildred, very much alive, but John cannot see or hear her. He burns Mildred’s remains in the furnace and keeps the ashes in a handbag, but she continues to haunt him until he scatters the ashes over a river and discards the handbag. When John attempts to murder another woman, he is foiled by Inspector Russell. His urges thus frustrated, when he returns home to find Helen waiting for him, he cannot repress the desire to murder her as a substitute. He takes Helen to the same concealed room where he murdered most of the models. After convincing her to change into a wedding dress, he tells Helen that he never wanted to hurt her, but wants to “fit this last piece into place.” He strikes at Helen with the cleaver. She blocks the blow, but the initial surge finally restores John’s memory: as a young boy, upset by his mother’s remarrying, he killed her and his stepfather with a cleaver.

Helen lets Inspector Russell and a team of policemen into the room; Russell had convinced her to take part in this sting operation before John had hired her. John is loaded into a police van with two policemen escorting him. One of them sets the handbag with Mildred’s ashes down beside John. Mildred appears, this time to John only. She tells him that now they will be together forever,

“first in the insane asylum, and then in Hell for all eternity”.

John goes berserk with terror.