I found Honeymoon Horror last night on an amazing YouTube channel that specializes in rare horror, many of which I have never even heard of, including this one. It’s such a relief that all these movies are able to stay uploaded but I think it helps that many, like Honeymoon Horror, have not been seen on physical media since the VCR times of video stores. Of course in the early 80s the stores were scrambling for content, so anything was being put on a tape with cover art that far surpassed the film’s quality, and that was the case here. Sony released this cheap Texas-made slasher and reportedly made over 20 million bones or clams in the parlance of our times.

Does the movie live up (or should I say die up) to the awesome cover art? Hell no, and if you’ve ever seen a slasher you will know exactly who the killer is from the get go, and there’s no Mrs. Voorhees this time to complicate matters. But it’s fun to watch the actors run around and say their lines, cause they really sell this like a 20 million dollar flick. The story is that a cheating woman and her porn-bestached lover get in a fight with her husband when he catches them at it. For reasons known only to the screenwriter there is an oil lamp as part of the proceedings and it gets knocked over and they don’t exactly kill her husband, but they leave him to die.

The next thing you know the two lovers are running a honeymoon camp called Love Island. We are given all the exposition by a sorority sister who comes into the general store to buy Halloween decorations to mess up the Love Island vacation cabins of three of her sisters who are getting married the next day. I have heard of putting shaving cream and cans on a car, but not this level of goofy sabotage. (All these wedding prank traditions seem to go back to the time when people were upset to be getting married to someone they didn’t know. Have people not heard you can marry someone you like now?) We also hear from the comic relief store clerk, sheriff, and deputy, who I understand were added in after filming ended to provide the setup. One wonders how the decorator girl got so much stuff at this store, because it looks on the inside like every crappy store on the way to a vacation camp where you’re going to get killed, meaning they have a bunch of cans and some cigarettes. But the marquee outside promises regular gas, BBQ, hot links, and chili dogs so we dare to dream that they have those paper skeletons with the metal joints that every classroom had on the door back when we were allowed to celebrate Halloween in school.

And they do! The sorority sisters arrive at rustic Love Island (which has no phones or TV only shitty cabins and a murderer) via a tiny boat that you have to drive yourself, which just looks like an awful way to spend your honeymoon if you ask me, especially since we’re told by the dialogue between the cheating couple from the beginning that these three couples are rich. But back to the girls who are decorating: they are immediately killed while disco music plays in the background. I don’t know how the boat got back to the town where the sheriff and the chili dogs reside.

And then the honeymoon couples show up and almost everyone is killed. And the killer seems to be targeting women. Is it the weird caretaker? You know it’s not. There is so little suspense or creativity around these killings that I actually began to root for the original murderers who burned up the woman’s husband. They just wanted to be together and get rich and successful running their stupid honeymoon camp. Sometimes you just have to accept that your wife would rather set you on fire, and move on with your life because she’s not that into you.

But as for the killings, you know how in the original Friday the 13th a girl gets an axe to the head? All my life after seeing that movie as a child I thought we actually saw the axe go into her head and her face splitting in two like a watermelon, but upon rewatching you don’t see anything much, it’s just what my brain perceived. Well, in Honeymoon Horror someone gets an axe to the head and it just sticks kind of on the surface with a little bit of blood coming out, and the victim just kind of sprawls there looking stupid and dead on the couch. Not that I’m one to want to see a lot of blood and gore, I don’t care either way if the movie is done well, but I just wanted to bring that up because this movie is obviously an even shittier Friday the 13th with the supposedly dead killer and the people doing the sex all over a depressing campground.

You know what bothered me the most about this movie, and it’s always the plot with me. The three girls who came over the day before the wedding to decorate were not even good friends with the three brides. You would think they must have been great friends in college for them to bother to go and buy paper skeletons and then drive themselves over in the little boat and get killed. But apparently they weren’t even invited to the weddings, because no one missed them, and at one point one of the brides mentions who must have decorated the cabins and refers to the girl as “that dingdong” and isn’t quite sure what her name is. If I carry my ass to Love Island to listen to disco and ruin your already dire honeymoon suite I had better be missed. I also wish we had seen the triple wedding, because who the hell does that?

Anyway, the movie ends with a great scene back on the mainland after all the bodies have been discovered where some young lovers in a car ask the sheriff if this is the way to Love Island and he just starts shooting his pistol into the air and telling them to git! I would like to see that become a meme. Just insert video of someone asking a stupid question, and that guy shooting his gun into the air. We need him here on the Georgia/Florida line to keep Florida Man out of Georgia!

P.S. there is an extra layer of irony or something like it with the sorority sisters decorating the cabins because according to IMDb all the bedroom scenes were done in the same room which was repainted and new curtains put up each time a different couple needed to pretend to scromp in order to make it look like there were multiple sets. Frugality!