The Honeymoon Killers (1970)
Directed by Leonard Kastle
Martha Beck, an obese nurse who is desperately lonely, joins a "correspondence club" and finds a romantic pen pal in Ray Fernandez. Martha falls hard for Ray, and is intent on sticking with him even when she discovers he's a con man who seduces lonely single women, kills them and then takes their money. She poses as Ray's sister and joins Ray on a wild killing spree, fueled by her lingering concern that Ray will leave her for one of his marks.
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What critics compared The Honeymoon Killers to
Like Leonard Kastle’s “The Honeymoon Killers” (1970), it’s a deliberately flat, affectless treatment of gruesome true-crime material.
Made in 1969, "The Honeymoon Killers" presaged elements of David Lynch's filmic approach, and clearly informed John McNaughton 's similarly-themed stomach-churner film " Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer ."
Dark humor, along the lines of "The Honeymoon Killers," gives way to fractured set pieces that gesture toward the film’s gratuitous climax, one that’s destined to bestow upon it a cult status.
As a kind of mash-up of Wild at Heart, Network, and The Honeymoon Killers, Natural Born Killers is unavoidably lurid and a bit much to take.
Ultimately, “Crimson Peak” turns into a gothic riff on “The Honeymoon Killers,” with Edith being seduced by the charming Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), who takes her under wing after she’s abruptly orphaned.
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Scorsese's oblique comments in Mary Pat Kelly's Martin Scorsese: A Journey, meanwhile, suggest the film goes beyond preserving his youth in amber to allegorize his being replaced as the director of The Honeymoon Killers: "You put [things] off and you put [things] off until finally...they fire you or you walk off and it's a disaster."