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| Shirley Stoler and Tony Lo Bianco in The Honeymoon Killers |
Cast: Shirley Stoler, Tony Lo Bianco, Mary Jane Higby, Doris Roberts, Kip McArdle, Marilyn Chris, Dortha Duckworth, Barbara Cason, Ann Harris, Mary Breen. Screenplay: Leonard Kastle. Cinematography: Oliver Wood. Film editing: Richard Brophy, Stanley Warnow. Music: excerpts from Symphonies No. 5, 6, and 9 by Gustav Mahler.
The Honeymoon Killers was Leonard Kastle's only outing as a director and it shows. Some scenes are framed badly, lopping off characters' heads or bodies, and many of the performers, actors never to be seen again, are awkward and wooden. The set decor is thrift-store cheap, the sound is often tinny, and the music cues hacked out of Mahler symphonies are jarring. It's easy to laugh at the opening title, which hammers home the message that what you're about to see is shocking. But at some point I stopped laughing. It's an undeniably effective movie perhaps because its low-budget cheesiness feels appropriate to the subject matter: a mismatched pair of con artists who prowl American suburbia in search of lonely women whom they can fleece for their sometimes paltry savings. Martha (Shirley Stoler) and Ray (Tony Lo Bianco) squabble and reconcile as they go about their spree of originally unintended murders. The director first hired for the movie was the young Martin Scorsese, who was fired for being too slow. Scorsese, who at that point had made only one feature, Who's That Knocking at My Door (1967), later admitted that the firing was probably justified. You have to wonder what the movie would be like if Scorsese decided to remake it today and if it would be nearly so sleazily effective. The Honeymoon Killers will never be what François Truffaut called it, "my favorite American film," but it's in some way an essential one.
