Film

Rip It Up, Issue 154, 1 May 1990, Page 24

Film

THE HONEYMOON KILLERS Director: Leonard Kastle "The incredibly shocking drama you are about to see is perhaps the nriost bizarre episode in the annals of American crime"— so we a re warned before The Honeymoon Killers gets . underway. Leonard Kastle'sfilm has become a cult favourite in the two decades since its original release and now it's back for the jaded '9os with a few details restored that the censor deemed unsuitable for the innocent eyes twenty years ago. The film is based on the Lonely <■ Hearts Murders of the 'sos. Shirley Stoller, as the overweight and decidely grouchy Martha Beck, joins forces with , Tony Lobianco as the greasily dapper Ray Fernandez to con a succession of spinsters and widows with often fatal results for the ladies concerned. The movie's brutality still has the power to shock, even in black and ' white with remarkably little explicit ' ’ gore. Yet the shot of Marilyn Chris's body in the bus with the tongue ' protruding or the slow drugging of Kip McArdle are extremely disturbing scenes. It's only in the hammering and clumsy strangling of Mary Jane Higby —a 'difficult murder' in the style of Hitchcock's Tom Curtain— that Kastle lets physical violence come to the fore. Perhaps for some Kastle's satire of the characters will be too cruel — the Catholic obsessions of the Higby character orthe patriotic zealour of McArdle's young moral majority matron—but both are such beautifully

turned performances. Kastle has a nice eye for detail: the first shot of Beck's mother on the bed could be a portrait by Diane Arbus and the heavy oppressive feel to the film is underlined by a shooting style which has the immediacy of'6os television. In the twenty years since Honeymoon Killers was launched upon ■ the world we've been introduced to the trash aesthetic of John Waters. There seems to be common ground here. Certainly Donna Duckworth plays ' Stoller's mother with a sense of />• over-the-top hysteria that Waters would applaud. I'm tempted to imagine ■ Honeymoon Killers played for laughs with Divine as Beck, Milk Stole as her friend, Edith Massey as one of her victimsand David Lochary as Frenandez., Now that would be a cult film to end all cult films... • WILLIAM DART . / EARTH GIRLS ARE EASY Director: Julian Temple. The Honeymoon Killers earned its' cult reputation over two decades; -X ' - Julian Temple's latest movie strives too hard for instant cult credibility. It's : Temple's first feature since the disastrous Absolute Beginners which struggled for its life in between . ' sequences that would have worked . better on MTV. Scriptwriter Julie Brown may give the Earth Girts best performance as the owner of the Curl Up and Dye salon but her script is little . more than one-liners and quips. Even the musical numbers haven't anything .. near the attack of Brown's own 'cult' record 'Homecoming Queen's Got A Gun'. The nearest to successful is 'Brand New Girl', the Beauty Shop sequence, but the lyrics fail it miserably. The film offers the silliest of fantasies. Three aliens fall to earth in their space-ship and after a major Nair treatment in Brown's salon, turn into two Californian hunks Jeff Goldblum. The Valley Girl phenomenon was satirized much more sharply years back in Martha Coolidge's Valley Girlbut \ then Temple seems unwiling to let it work as a straightforward farce, bringing in clips from Jerry Lewis's Nutty Professor and Jean Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast to lend his film intellectual pretensions. In just a few short sequences, Lewis's Buddy Love character shows everyone on the screen what classic comedy is. WILLIAM DART ' ’ - ; .