The Honeymoon Killers<\/em> is, to put it mildly, not of that ilk. Its focal characters certainly are not glamorous; Martha Beck (Shirley Stoler) has a hard, mean face, and a stern, nasty manner, and the man she meets via a lonely-hearts letter-writing club, Ray Fernandez (Tony Lo Bianco) is a sleazy piece of work, a grifter and a cheat, buttering her up with flattery and picking her pocket when she\u2019s not looking. They\u2019re less like characters from Fritz Lang than John Waters \u2013 vile, unlikable people, who seem to deserve no better than each other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Kastle\u2019s approach is similarly stripped down. Cinematographer Oliver Wood \u2013 who would go on to shoot such massive movies as Die Hard 2, Face\/Off, <\/em>and the original Bourne<\/em> trilogy \u2013 adopts In Cold Blood\u2019s<\/em> tabloid-style black-and-white photography <\/em>froma few years earlier, but he and Kastle augment that monochromatic look with drab production design, flat lighting, and bland costumes, all the more to underscore that the horrible crimes were committed by the most average people imaginable.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n Ray has figured out how to use his good looks and \u201cexotic\u201d manner to bilk lonely women out of their money, and though Martha catches on to Ray\u2019s games fairly early, she doesn\u2019t push him away \u2013 in fact, she suggests they go into business together. They work out a cover story where she poses as his sister, joining him to meet his new brides (and to help him rob them), and it\u2019s a good idea in theory, but it all goes sideways pretty quickly; he\u2019d like to have a little fun in the process, you see, and their jealousy, lies, and pettiness threaten to upend the hustle.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Even when they\u2019re running this scam, it doesn\u2019t come across as particularly fun or funny \u2013 Kastle eschews the brassiness typical of con movies to portray this as what it is: two soulless monsters taking advantage of sad, lonely people. (Which is not to say that it\u2019s an entirely humorless enterprise; there is some domestic comedy to be found in nagging old Janet \u2013 Martha\u2019s pick for a mark – driving her batty in the middle of the night.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n Eventually, of course, they turn from robbery to homicide, but the murders are presented as exactly what they are, with no attempt to soft-pedal them in style or flair. When they decide to kill Janet, they go back and forth over who has to take care of her, and then Martha hits Fran with the hammer in a flat, plain wide shot, a horrifying crime rendered in a matter-of-fact fashion. After the deed is done, in a handheld shot that now plays as stunningly contemporary, Ray removes his blood-stained clothes, deposits them on the body of the woman they\u2019ve just killed, and walks into the bedroom nude to present himself to Martha. We see his naked form from behind, but there\u2019s not much doubt as to the state he\u2019s in when he gets there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n The two murders that follow are even more disturbing, and rendered with a similar flatness. Though there are a couple of stylish touches here \u2013 a tight close-up of a victim\u2019s terrified eyes as they strategize killing her and her daughter, for example \u2013 there\u2019s nothing that can blunt the impact of Martha luring a grade-school age girl into a cellar by insisting a puppy is waiting for here there. The entire sequence is overwhelming in its dread, but it\u2019s also pathetic. This is who and what these people are.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Martin Scorsese, with only his debut film Who\u2019s That Knocking At My Door <\/em>in his pocket, was famously hired as the original director of The Honeymoon Killers<\/em>, and fired a few weeks in; Kastle later told the New York Times<\/em><\/a>, “The problem with him was that everything took very long.” After another interim director, Donald Volkman, was brought in for two weeks, Kastle eventually took over himself. It\u2019s hard to imagine a director farther from The Honeymoon Killers<\/em> than Scorsese, whose stylized expressions of violence in the likes of Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, <\/em>and Goodfellas<\/em> are the polar opposite of what\u2019s happening here. And it\u2019s similarly hard to square this early example of \u201ctrue crime\u201d with what that genre became, with sex symbols like Zac Efron donning the duds of serial killers to prove how complex they really are. That\u2019s all play acting. The Honeymoon Killers<\/em> feels like the real thing, and it\u2019s much scarier for it. “The Honeymoon Killers” is currently streaming on The Criterion Channel.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/03\/honeymoon2-1024x637.jpg\")
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