Review: Nightmare Honeymoon

After escaping the oncoming wedding party’s chase (a bizarre family custom) Newlyweds Dack Rambo and Rebecca Dianna Smith inadvertently witness a contract murder. For their troubles, they are attacked. Smith is raped, and once the unconscious Rambo (who- wait for it…is a Vietnam veteran. I’ll let you make your own gags there) wakes up and finds out about the rape, he sets about revenge against the two creeps (John Beck and Roy Jenson). David Huddleston is a crummy hotel owner, Pat Hingle is Smith’s good ‘ol boy dad, a young Dennis Burkley is among the hick wedding party, and Jay Robinson is a slippery mid-level baddie.

 

I’m no sicko, and I’ve never been a fan of the rape-revenge subgenre of exploitation cinema, but if you’re going to make one, why would you keep the rape off-screen? Well, ask that to director Elliot Silverstein (who has made a few popular films like “Cat Ballou” and “A Man Called Horse”), who does just that in this virtually unheard of 1973 film. It’s so tame and unbearably bland you’d swear it was made-for-TV. The decision to put the rape scene off-screen (there’s a second one that we do see, but it’s awfully brief and obscured by some of the worst lighting I’ve ever seen) is just one of many things that contribute to making this film so terribly inert. This is despite decent work by character actors Huddleston and Robinson, and a rock-solid score by Elmer Bernstein (“The Magnificent Seven”, “The Great Escape”, “To Kill a Mockingbird”, “Sweet Smell of Success”), who is clearly too good for this garbage.

 

The film, shot in Mississippi and New Orleans, starts out with a bizarro wedding ritual where the family chase after the bride and groom after the wedding, and if they catch them, they get to come along to the honeymoon and essentially take all the ‘fun’ out of it. During these scenes, character actor Pat Hingle and co, act as though this were an episode of “The Dukes of Hazzard”. Oh, if only that were true, we might actually get some good ‘ol boy entertainment, even if it would still be a tame experience. I kept waiting for Burt Reynolds and Bo Hopkins as a guy named ‘Skeeter’, but no, that too would indicate a bit of fun. Instead we get some dude named Dack Rambo. Wait, wasn’t ‘Dack’ the noise that the aliens from “Mars Attacks!” made? Dack! Dack! Dack Dack! Rambo and fellow lead Smith are pretty bland and forgettable, we just don’t care about them because they aren’t interesting or charismatic enough. Worse still, neither of them manages to speak above a whisper for almost the entire film, rendering a lot of their dialogue inaudible. Villains Jenson and Beck aren’t remotely credible, Jenson looks way too old to be associated with Beck, who for his part is just plain awful and over-the-top.

 

This ends up being your typical glacial-paced “Straw Dogs”-type movie, only with the rape being off-screen and the violence barely existent, too. Like I said, Huddleston and Richardson do well in brief parts, but this is exceedingly dull and tame, something an exploitation film should never be. Too dull for mainstream audiences, too dull and tame for the exploitation set. No one wins, I found it nearly impossible to sit through. The cinematography by Harry Stradling Jr (“Welcome to Hard Times”, “Airport ‘77”, “Convoy”) is appalling, it’s ugly and way too dark. Scripted by S. Lee Pogostin (writer-director of “Hard Contract”, with James Coburn and Burgess Meredith), from the book by Lawrence Block, whose books have been turned into films as good as “A Walk Among the Tombstones” and as bad as this and “8 Million Ways to Die”.

 

Rating: D-