The Honeymoon Killers is a 1970 American crime film written and directed by Leonard Kastle, and starring Shirley Stoler and Tony Lo Bianco.

Its plot follows an overweight nurse who is seduced by a handsome con man, with whom she embarks on a murder spree of single women.

The film was inspired by the true story of Raymond Fernandez and Martha Beck, the notorious "lonely hearts killers" of the 1940s.

Filmed primarily in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, production of The Honeymoon Killers began with Martin Scorsese as its appointed director.

The Honeymoon Killers went on to achieve cult status as well as critical recognition, and was named by François Truffaut as his "favorite American film."

Ray allows Martha to visit him in New York, where he reveals he is a con man who makes his living by seducing and then swindling lonely women.

After Young aggressively attempts to bed the bridegroom, Martha gives her a large dose of pills, and Ray puts the drugged woman on a bus.

They bury her body beneath their cellar floor in her trunk, tossing into the grave the two framed depictions of Jesus that, Martha notes sarcastically, she'd told them she took everywhere she went.

[11][12] Shirley Stoler and Tony Lo Bianco, both stage actors in New York, were cast in the leading roles.

"[13] Stoler and Chris had worked together in stage productions at The Living Theatre in Manhattan,[13] while Lo Bianco had performed on Broadway.

In the scene in which Martha bludgeons Janet Fay with a hammer, "condoms containing glycerine and red dye were affixed to the head of the victim with plaster of Paris.

"[22] While its unglamorous depiction of violence has been noted by critics,[23] Rubin contests that the film is not "completely heartless" due to the "discomfiting vulnerability of the victims and the undiluted horror of their deaths.

"[1] American International Pictures (AIP) acquired distribution rights to the film in September 1969, and went as far as producing key art, publicity stills, and promotional posters.

"[28] Harvey Taylor of the Detroit Free Press also championed the performances as "excellent," particularly those of Stoler and Lo Bianco, though he conceded that the film's grittiness left him "mildly nauseated.

"[19] Stephen Allen of New Jersey's Courier-Post made similar observations that the photography has a "harsh documentary or underground film quality that lends an air of authenticity," and also praised the realistic casting.

[20] Upon a revival screening in 1992, Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times praised the film, writing: "This quality of being true to itself is The Honeymoon Killers's greatest strength.

Writer-director Kastle, who unaccountably never made another feature, is in perfect control of his material here, understanding it thoroughly and making sure that everything, from the harsh lighting to the flat staging to the snippets of Mahler on the soundtrack, unite to enhance the rawness and relentlessness of the film.

Club concludes by noting that the film's "nauseous mixture of laughs and shocks, and the fact that real passion drives Kastle's characters even when they plot against each other, is what makes The Honeymoon Killers such an enduring one-off.

It works, as Gary Giddins argues in the liner notes of the restored DVD edition, 'as the perfect product of the same anxious, permissive age that produced Waters, Night of the Living Dead, and blaxploitation.

[31] The film was reportedly banned in Australia upon its release in 1970 until the late 1980s after being deemed "violent, indecent and obscene" by the Australian censorship board.