The catchpenny title and lurid poster mask a surprisingly serious and compelling film that straddles exploitation and arthouse, looking as much like a John Cassavettes film as a Roger Corman film. Deliberately shot in black and white to emulate a 40s crime thriller and filmed with a documentary feel by Leonard Kastle (an opera composer and music teacher rather than a film-maker), whose only directorial credit this was.
Based on the real life “Lonely Hearts Killers,” Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck who preyed on lonely women in the 1940s, the film retains the character names of both the killers and their victims but changes a lot of the incidental details. It opens with a caption warning us that “the incredibly shocking drama you are about to see is perhaps the most bizarre episode in the annals of American crime,” wording that recalls the advertising campaign for Herschell Gordon Lewis’ Blood Feast (1963) and anticipating the opening crawl of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974).
Disarmingly, Kastle starts by begging some sympathy for its lead characters, particularly overweight and lonely nurse Martha (an incredible performance by Shirley Stoler) who we first meet caring for her senile mother (Dortha Duckworth) in Mobile, Alabama. Well-meaning friend Bunny (Doris Roberts, later the mum in sitcom Everybody Loves Raymond (1996-2005)) signs Martha up for a lonely hearts club and she soon receives a letter from Raymond Fernandez (Tony Lo Bianco, also excellent) of New York and a relationship soon develops. But Kastle (who also write the script) doesn’t allow us long to feel any kind of empathy for Martha – fired by her Jewish boss at the hospital she shows her true colours, snapping “I’m not sure Hitler wasn’t right about you people.”
The bitter, permanently angry and deeply unhinged Martha is the catalyst for Ray’s transformation from sleazy, predatory con man to killer, driven to greater acts of violence by Martha’s pathological jealousy. They start by collaborating in Ray’s schemes, Martha passing herself off as his sister before they murder their first victim, the pregnant Myrtle Young (Marilyn Chris). The bodies are soon piling up as the couple move around the country preying on lonely and desperate women. Eventually, after Ray gets one victim, Delphine Downing (Kip McArdle), pregnant Martha realises that he’s broken his promise never to actually sleep with any of the women and decides that their killing spree has to end.
Ray and Martha are well suited to each other – they start out as amoral and manipulative as each other before become sociopathic monsters, egging each other on to commit ever more brutal murders, culminating in the genuinely shocking double murder of Delphine and her young daughter Rainelle (Mary Breen). The camera rests on Delphine’s panicked eyes as she lies drugged on the bed of a shabby motel room, Ray and Martha discussing off camera what they’re going to do to her and her daughter. It’s the bleakest moment in a relentlessly downbeat film, an authentically chilling scene that you’ll find hard to forget.
What makes the killings all the more upsetting is the very ordinariness of the murderers, their victims and their surroundings. The killings are definitely unglamorous, brutal attacks that take place in the drabbest of surroundings, lonely people being slaughtered by equally lonely but dangerously out of control people increasingly reliant on the toxic and highly dependent relationship they’ve found themselves in.
Kastle directs with a steely, detached eye, never casting judgement, simply capturing the couple’s killing spree as if making a fly-on-the-wall documentary about their twisted lives. Kastle took over the film from Donald Volkman, a director industrial films who in turn took over from Martin Scorcese who started shooting the film but was fired by producer Warren Steibel after Scorcese shot everything in wide master shots, leaving the editor little to work with. A few scenes shot by Scorcese supposedly remain in the film.
François Truffaut claimed that The Honeymoon Killers was his favourite American film and although it fell into semi-obscurity shortly after its release it had many champions among critics and film-makers whose support helped to fuel its growing cult reputation. Among those who didn’t get it at the time was the film’s own distributors, American International Pictures who picked up the independently shot film in late 1969 and tried to pass off as a cheap exploitation film. It was soon picked up by Cinerama Releasing Corporation who seemed just as clueless, eventually double-billing it with Amicus’ horror anthology The House That Dripped Blood (1970), an altogether more fun genre film. But both solo and as a part of the double bill, the film did well at the box office and was well received by the critics.
The film’s portrayal of achingly ordinary people descending into a dangerous folie à deux struck a chord, audiences fascinated by the film’s grittiness and the raw authenticity of the murder scenes. It remains, like its director, a true one-off – other attempts to tell the story of the “Lonely Hearts Killers,” including the Mexican Profundo carmesí/Deep Crimson (1996), Todd Robinson’s Lonely Hearts (2006) (which improbably cast Salma Hayek as Martha) and the Belgian/French Alleluia (2014) (an episode of the American television series Deadline (1959-1961), Lonely Hearts Killer, predated Kastle’s film) were far less successful in exploring the complex psychologies of its protagonists.
The film’s cult following rose steadily through the 1980s to the point where New York based distributors Manley Productions took out a full page advert in trade journal Variety in February 1986 claiming that Warren Steible was in pre-production on The Honeymoon Killers 2. The film was never made.
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