My first thought watching Leonard Kastle’s grimy black & white crime romance The Honeymoon Killers was “Surely, John Waters loves this.” Without any evidence or background context it seemed obvious to me that The Honeymoon Killers’s mix of camp excess & horrific violence was an influence on Waters’s work, especially evident in the early scene where the killers’ first mark is shown atonally singing “America the Beautiful” at top volume in a bathtub. Even Martha Beck’s over-plucked eyebrows felt like a blueprint for Divine’s signature look, an over-the-top perversion of vintage bad taste in 1950s fashion. The truth is, though, that John Waters was already a fully-formed artist by the time The Honeymoon Killers was released. In fact, his film that most closely resembles Kastle’s, Multiple Maniacs, was released the very same year & already featured Divine in her full, knife-sharp-eyebrows glory. Waters’s work is more a kindred spirit than a direct descendant.

The opening credits scroll for Multiple Maniacs is framed like microfiche, as if the audience were researching old crime reports in archived newspapers. Both Waters’s film & The Honeymoon Killers were inspired by real-life serial killers (the Sharon Tate murder of the 1960s & the “Lonely Hearts killers” of the 1940s, respectively) and lean into the grim, cruel despair of those subjects. You can practically stain your fingers on the films’ cheap tabloid ink. They’re also tabloid-ready stories (one real & one fictional) because their respective killers are romantically linked & commit their crimes as a couple, turning tales of human despair into a kind of in-print soap opera. Multiple Maniacs is much freer to pursue an impossible, fantastic narrative, though, since it was merely inspired by the Sharon Tate murder (and filmed before Charles Manson’s name was even connected to that crime), branching off into its own detached-from-reality criminal fantasy. As opposed to the newlywed grifters of The Honeymoon Killers, Divine & David Lochary’s own theft & murder spree is a long-establish bond involving a traveling side show (Lady Divine’s Cavalcade of Perversions) where unsuspecting audiences are robbed at the end of each performance. Both crime/love partner relationships devolve in the same way, though; the male accomplice is caught cheating & the woman goes berserk (to Godzilla-scale effect in Multiple Maniacs).

What’s maybe not immediately apparent in either of these pictures is how that low-fi crime & grime is contrasted with high art sensibilities. Offended by the Hollywood gloss of Arthur Penn’s Bonnie & Clyde, Leonard Kastle stated that with The Honeymoon Killers, “I didn’t want to show beautiful shots of beautiful people.” Waters may have bested him there, setting up his own romantic crime thriller as a side show where odd-looking weirdos perform heinous acts like licking bicycle seats, shooting heroin, and homosexual kissing (!!!) to their literally captive audience’s horror. Where Waters dared to stoop lower in the unattractive details, he also aimed higher with his artistic sensibilities, especially in a scene where Divine & Mink Stole paly with anally-inserted rosary beads while reciting the Stations of the Cross, an Andrei Rublev-esque vision of Christ’s trials intercutting their lesbian foray. That surreality emerges again in an unexplained scene where Divine is raped by a giant lobster, but I fail to recall what Tarkovsky movie that might resemble. Francois Truffaut once stated that The Honeymoon Killers was his all-time favorite American film, as it was the one that most closely approximated the handheld immediacy of the French New Wave. One has to wonder if he ever got to see the less widely-distributed Multiple Maniacs before making that claim (or if it would have made a difference).

Even if Waters was more a contemporary than a devotee of Kastle’s, he surely loved The Honeymoon Killers all the same. In an interview with NPR, Waters recommended The Honeymoon Killers as a personal favorite, quipping, “With internet dating today, this certainly could happen again.” What I’d most like to know at this point is whether that appreciation was mutual. Did Kastle ever see Multiple Maniacs? Would he enjoy it if he had?  Waters’s own aversion to Hollywood phonies & manicured beauty would at least indicate that Kastle may have appreciated it more than Bonnie & Clyde, but having fun with a Dreamlanders-era Waters film would require a little more extreme disposition than just that. It’s subjective which film is the better of the pair, but Multiple Maniacs is undeniably the more extreme.

For more on August’s Movie of the Month, the romantic crime thriller The Honeymoon Killers, check out our Swampchat discussion of the film, our examination of Martin Scorsese’s involvement with the film, and last week’s look at its mid-2000s Hollywood-phony equivalent.

-Brandon Ledet