Responses to The Honeymoon Killers:

"...The Honeymoon Killers has something else - a more concentrated, less cluttered, clearer vision than you are likely to have found in even the best conventional crime movies. Unusually seedy in all its particulars, utterly unflattering to all its characters, sufficiently horrible (but never gratuitously shocking) in the details of its murders, Kastle's film succeeds as a kind of chamber drama of desperate attraction and violent death."
– Roger Greenspun, New York Times, February 5, 1970.

"Shot in cruel black and white....the movie's a claustrophobic triumph of ambience, all high-watt lightbulbs, vinyl seat covers, polyester prints, canned sound, abrupt explosions of Mahler, and overall clamminess."
- Michael Atkinson, Village Voice

"Much of the genius of Kastle's first (and, to date, only) film comes from its ability to keep throwing sympathy in the direction of its monstrous protagonists, giving them hopelessly square victims prone to singing "America the Beautiful" in the bath or taking a future husband and sister-in-law out for a luxurious dinner at an old-folks cafeteria....Kastle's willingness to throw in such taboo-flouting moments of black comedy (usually to the strains of Gustav Mahler) often makes The Honeymoon Killers play like a less obviously tongue-in-cheek version of an early John Waters film. But when it erupts into violence, the laughs stop cold. That 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.
- Keith Phillips, The Onion AV Club

"One of the most astonishing independent films of the past 40 years. It's uncompromising and brutal. It's stark and unsettling. Filmed in documentary-style in black and white, The Honeymoon Killers looks terrifyingly real. You feel guilty while you're watching it, as if you're peeking through a keyhole and seeing things you were never meant to see."
- Gary Johnson, Images: A Journal of Film and Popular Culture

"The Honeymoon Killers is a fantastic – if somewhat overlooked – piece of fact-based entertainment; it works as a reminder of one of America's most infamous murder sprees, and it tells the tale with remarkable tenacity and restraint."
- Scott Weinberg, The Apollo Movie Guide

"The most striking achievement about the movie is that writer-director Kastle makes no concessions to audience's expectations. Here is a coherent film, and a first one at that, that refused to make any compromises--marketability, aesthetics, or morality. A classic independent film, The Honeymoon Killers is as chilly and scary as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986). It is a testament to the film's integrity that 23 years after it was made, its edge, intensity and impact are still very much in evidence."
- Film critic Emanuel Levy, emanuellevy.com

"The lurid title promises cheap thrills, but prepare yourself. This unjustly neglected sleeper has not lost its disturbing power to shock...harrowing, but essential viewing."
- VideoHound's Complete Guide to Cult Flicks and Trash Pics

"*** stars. Low-budget item has deservedly developed a cult reputation over the years."
- Leonard Maltin's Movie & Video Guide

"Made on a very low budget...made with care, authenticity and attention to detail. The acting throughout the film never falters."
- Variety Movie Guide, edited by Derek Elley

"Stoler and Lo Bianco (and, in a wonderful supporting performance as the pair's final victim, veteran actress Mary Jane Higby) triumph over the occasional distraction of the low production values. Not all of the performers fare so well; in particular, the victims, for instance, tend to overact so they seem amateurish. Within the film's framework, their deaths almost appear punishment for being so annoying. Is it funny? Of course it is. But it's ghastly, too. The uneasy mix of the funny and the grotesque pulls you both ways."
- Jake Euker, PopMatters

Compiled by Eric Weber