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By PAUL BRENNER
In the rash of horrific true
crime thrillers that hit American screens in the
mid-sixties to early-seventies ("In Cold Blood,"
"The Boston Strangler," "Badlands," "Pretty
Poison"), perhaps the most chilling is Leonard
Kastle's cult-film "The Honeymoon Killers" -- now
available on DVD through The Criterion Collection.
Based on a multiple murder crime spree from the
1940s, the film concerns the lonely, overweight
Martha Beck (Shirley Stoler in a great
performance) who falls in love with flim-flam
artist Ray Fernandez (Tony Lo Bianco) through a
lonely-hearts club. Ray's scam is to contact
lonely spinsters through the lonely-hearts club,
achieve a level of phony intimacy with them, and
proceed to fleece them of their savings. But when
Martha comes along, Ray's chicanery progresses to
the next step -- murder.
Kastle's film is extremely low budget and he makes
the cheapness work in the film's favor. The
ticky-tacky suburban homes and rooms lend the film
a special non-Hollywood reality and Kastle's
preference for long two-shots with the actors
reacting to each other in these claptrap spaces
provides a neo-documentary look -- Dwain Esper
meets Eric Rohmer. This psuedo-documentary feel
belies the emotional bankruptcy of the characters
and their lives; this is a world where one person
is always subtly conning the other and
manipulating their feelings. "The Honeymoon
Killers" is neo-realism turned inside out. There
is no noble idealism under the surface as in De
Sica or Rossellini. Rather, it is all surface --
cold, heartless and killing. As Kastle remarks in
an interview of the DVD, "The Honeymoon Killers"
is like looking at reality through a keyhole.
Once again, the Criterion presentation is
schizophrenic. The video transfer is excellent and
the extras are fine supplements to the film (the
afore-mentioned Leonard Kastle interview, the
trailer, biographies, the press book, and an
excellent pictorial essay by Scott Christianson).
But the audio is atrocious. Maybe, the audio
source material is just plain bad. But whatever
the case, the sound is excruciatingly bad -- it
sounds like the gravelly audio that used to be
heard emitting from drive-in movie speakers. |
