Review of The Honeymoon Killers

Tony Lo Bianco plays a Latin cad who meets women through a dating service, happily strings them along and marries them under an alias before taking off with their money; after meeting Shirley Stoler's possessive, mercurial Martha, he almost reluctantly allows his deceptions to turn into a series of murders. Low-budget queasiness (worked on at an early point by Martin Scorsese) takes a surprising amount of time to mount its grisly story--and by this point, one is watching and waiting for one of the nasty killings to occur simply because nothing else is happening. Lo Bianco and Stoler argue constantly, yet we can't see why he is so devoted to her (or why he changed his course of action for her in the first place). Stoler, in her nurse's uniform, looks like a camp icon (and in a house-dress with her hair down, she seems a refugee from a John Waters satire); her performance is almost all on one-note and she's tiresome, though Lo Bianco is exceptional and well-cast as a horny, naughty boy in a man's body. Based on a real-life couple in the 1940s dubbed 'The Lonely Hearts Killers', the movie was trumped the year before by the dark comedy "No Way To Treat A Lady" (which was actually more explicit and disturbing than this film). It isn't a terrible picture (some of the conceptions and camera compositions are startling), but with so little happening in the foreground, interest quickly wanes. *1/2 from ****