Review of The Honeymoon Killers (1970) by Alex S — 24 Mar 2011

Itâ(TM)s not often you get a movie that has absolutely no redeemable characters in it and yet remains captivating and fascinating on an almost perverse level. Granted, some of this probably has to do with the true story of an overweight, out-of-work nurse teaming up with a notorious con artist guy who seduces women into proposals and robs them blind of their riches and some of it has to do with how their plans escalate from thievery into assaults and eventually multiple murders (including a child in what is easily the most haunting scene).

Then you look behind the scenes and realize that Kastle only directed this movie and never went on to dabble in cinema again â" how exactly did this guy follow up material originally shot by Scorsese and craft a downright frighteningly engaging two-hour powerhouse of a movie? I suspect sorcery or maybe a diet of twigs and Pixie Stix but whatever it was, Kastle delivers a tale of âBonnie and Clydeâ? that has no glamour and even less appeal.

Our duo are positively repulsive on multiple levels, from physical to psychological depths, and yet they have an odd attraction to one another and we as an audience cannot look away from them and the paths of destruction they leave (which includes everything from verbal abuse, mental games, unflinching blows to the head with a hammer, strangulation, pointblank gunshots and much more on this laundry list of atrocities).

We may struggle to hear some scenes (due to how they were shot) and we may question some of the direction thrown at us but at the end, no one is questioning the need for something uplifting to overcome the emotional beatdown in the past two hours, nor are they questioning the feeling that they have just witnessed something profoundly mesmerizing.