The Deepest Cuts is a weekly invitation into some of the sleaziest, goriest, most under-explored corners of horror and cult film online. Every title will be streamable and totally NSFW. Whether it’s a 1960s grindhouse masterpiece, something schlocky from the 90s, or hardcore horror from around the world, these films are guaranteed to shock, disturb, tickle, or generally blow your mind.

“The incredibly shocking drama you are about to see is perhaps the most bizarre episode in the annals of American crime. The unbelievable events depicted are based on newspaper accounts and court records. This is a true story.”

The solemnity of this opening title card suggests that the ensuing film will be serious – a true crime exposé, an episode of 60 Minutes. Do not be misled. Premiering in 1969, at the beginning of the New Hollywood era, in which independent, international, and schlock (from the likes of American International Pictures) films were emerging as a critical force in the world of cinema, The Honeymoon Killers is hardly a news-channel-appropriate treatment. Shot in the stark black and white of the era’s arthouse films and starring soon-to-be cult-movie stars Shirley Stoler and Tony Lo Bianco (in their first onscreen roles), it’s a compulsively watchable, disturbing combination of devastating violence and dark comedy.

The Honeymoon Killers portrays the true story of the murder spree perpetrated by the so-called “lonely hearts killers” eventually executed in 1951, Martha Beck and Ray Fernandez. In the film, their love is consecrated when Martha threatens, disingenuously, to kill herself; Ray invites her to his bachelor pad where he reveals, via a stack of framed photographs, his history of seducing and bilking women via lonelyhearts-letter romances, and she agrees, stone-faced, that she would still give her life to be with him. It is as though the evil within each of them recognizes its true partner in the other.

Though she will be forced to watch Ray give his affections to other women, posing as his sister, the strength of Martha’s devotion and greed – and the ease with which she dispatches with their victims – make her into an active participant in the brutality to come. When taken in comparison with the likes of, say, “Amazing Amy” at the conclusion of Gone Girl, who’s become the villain to her schmuck of a husband, forcing him to remain in a loveless marriage and insisting that they “deserve” one another, the love between Ray and Martha is a rollercoaster of sick glee and sloppy passion.

The film is cruel in its brute physicality, beginning, first and foremost, with Martha Beck herself. Weighing in at 200 pounds upon her execution, the real Martha insisted to the end that she was only 185 pounds; the film relishes every opportunity to show her eating furiously, lustily, cramming pretzels and buttered bread and chocolate truffles in her lipsticked mouth. Stoler is like a toned-down, evil Divine, driven by obsessive love rather than a belief in the redeeming powers of filth and fashion.

This fascination with the physical extends to the camera’s unflinching attention to the death throes of the couple’s victims. Myrtle, for example, poisoned by pills from Martha, pathetically whimpers that she feels “so sick,” and we hear her desperately, faintly moan from her lonely bus seat as Ray walks quick, smooth, and smirking back to the car he is stealing from her. Disgust permeates the film in the treacly behavior of the poor spinsters and the sparsely-furnished apartments and dimly-lit rooms providing the backdrop to the deviant romance. One murder scene is particularly brutal, with the bitter pathos of the old woman’s pleas that she didn’t want her checks back, she only wanted “a breath of fresh air” – something sadistically and strategically lacking from the grim unfolding of the film itself.

Though originally billed as an exploitation film, and remarkable for the violent banality portrayed in its low-budget effects, The Honeymoon Killers does have a few signals of higher class: it features excerpts from Gustav Mahler’s 5th and 6th symphonies, whose weighty and repetitive violins provide a sense of dread – but also, perhaps, a certain campy melodrama, particularly as they underline hefty Martha’s imperious footsteps or her casual kicking-aside of a child’s wheelbarrow.

First helmed by none other than Martin Scorcese, some of the sequences are reportedly (and visibly) his. The final work is considered composer Leonard Kastle’s screenwriting and directorial debut, as well as his only film; one can’t help but be reminded of a similarly terrifying one-production-wonder, Night of the Hunter, directed by Charles Laughton. Like that masterpiece of 1955, The Honeymoon Killers is both strikingly unique and a predecessor for any number of tawdry-yet-unforgettable true crime films to follow.

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You can find The Honeymoon Killers streaming free on Hulu.

For more insight into the best (and worst) of cult horror classics, check past editions of The Deepest Cuts here.

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