Nightmare Honeymoon

Nightmare Honeymoon takes a simple, but well-done, revenge premise and botches it all to hell.

The story sees a couple played by Dack Rambo and Rebecca Dianna Smith seek revenge after being beaten and raped for inadvertently witnessing a murder during their honeymoon.

Adapted by Hard Contract writer/director S. Lee Pogostin from the novel by Lawrence Block, the script starts well, establishing a good setup, but then falters, unwilling, or unable, to decide if it’s a straight-up revenge film or a melodrama. The result is either a watered down thriller or a sadistic melodrama, depending on your point of view. Either way, it doesn’t work.

For his part, director Elliot Silverstein does offer a lot of local color, especially during the film’s opening sequences, but he soon fails to recognize the shortcomings of his leads, as their painful emoting is the first sign that things are going to go horribly downhill.

First, despite having a name like Dack Rambo, the man’s no action hero, and second, Rebecca Dianna Smith is just awful. Whatever sympathy you might have felt for her character as a result of her plight quickly drains away as she drawls on, over emoting in every scene, much of which could and should have been cut down in editing.

That said, the opening of Nightmare Honeymoon isn’t bad, just turn it off after about fifteen minutes when Rambo and Smith run across the killers.