Haunted Honeymoon (1986)

Episode 439, 2 Guys and a Chainsaw Horror Movie Review Podcast

Todd: Hello and welcome to another episode of Two Guys and a Chainsaw. I’m Todd.

Craig: And I’m Craig.

Todd: We are week two into our month of horror comedies, brought to you by Craig. You chose all of these and uh, I have to say, I’m really happy with your choices. They wouldn’t have probably been the ones that I chose, but having chosen them, now that I’m looking at them, I’m like, I don’t know if I could have done a better job because I like going back to things that I haven’t seen in a while.

Mm-hmm. Or bringing to light stuff that might be a little forgotten or unknown. And I feel like this one just screamed out. From my past. The one that we’re doing today is Haunted Honeymoon. That’s starring Gene Wilder and Gilda Radner. And God, I remember very distinctly watching this movie. My dad rented it for us.

I’m pretty sure I didn’t see it in the theater. ’cause 1986 

Craig: you probably didn’t beget it had a, it had a super limited run. It bombed. Oh yeah. Bad it, it was only in theaters for 

Todd: like a week. That’s right. I remember watching it with my parents and it must have been at home and I remembered enjoying it, but thinking it was a bit odd because it.

It had this story within a story aspect to it, and also there was this mystery, and at the time I was really, I’ve always been kind of fascinated with radio and the old timey stuff, and because this is takes place, it is a period piece, right? It takes place during the, you’d say like the forties or whatever I suppose.

Thirties, forties. Yeah. Thirties, forties. Yeah. And is about these two people hosting a radio show. And I just remember, especially this moment in the middle of the movie where you think all these scary things are happening, but then outside the window there’s somebody shaking a thing that makes it. Like lightning thunder, the thunder sound type thing.

Yeah. Like shaking a metal big metal plate. Yeah. Yeah. Which now that I’ve watched the movie, I realized that’s kind of a false memory. Yeah. There is a guy who shakes a big metal plate for thunder sound, but it’s not outside the window in the middle. I. But the idea is the same anyway. Uh, yeah. And I, I haven’t seen it since, I guess probably 1986 when I was a kid, so I was really excited to come back to it.

So what made you decide to choose this movie? Man, 

Craig: I don’t know. This is, I think this is probably one of those movies from my. Childhood that I really liked, but I thought, I don’t know if we can really do it on the podcast, but we can. And I don’t know why I ever felt that way. First of all, we can do whatever we want, I guess.

Secondly, one of the few spaces in our lives where we have ultimate control, 

Todd: we should 

Clip: take 

Todd: advantage. 

Craig: Secondly, if it’s not a horror movie, which is a fair. Argument. It’s at least like a parody of a horror movie, which I think is fair game. Like, yeah, we’ve done Scream, I mean, scream’s kind of a, I don’t know if, if we were to do scary movie, I wouldn’t think that was out of bounds, and I don’t think this is either.

Plus I just. Love it. I mean, that’s, that’s why I picked it. This is kind of like I said, one of those that I’ve wanted to do forever and have just hesitated bringing up. ’cause I didn’t know if it really fit, but I love everything about it. I, I don’t even know where to begin it. It blows me away that it was.

So critically panned and it wasn’t successful at all because this movie is like, it’s just so joyful to me. Like I’m sitting here right now with the biggest smile on my face. It’s charming, it’s sweet. It’s. Innocent. It’s like, it, it’s fun. It, it does so much fun stuff with these old school horror movie tropes.

I love the whole radio show thing. It’s not really so much that they’re hosting a radio show. They are the stars of one of those. 1930s Radio serials. Yeah. Which I, I’ve never really listened to, and you and I have talked about this before. I know that you have kind of listened to some of those. Oh yeah.

But this movie has always made me. Fascinated about those. And, you know, this is Hollywood, so I don’t know how real it is, but I feel like I get a little peek behind the scenes of these people putting this thing together in the moment, all with, you know, practical sound effects and people doing different voices and, and they’re all just in, you know, one room in a recording studio.

But as the movie illustrates, they can tell a really vivid story. Uh, I just think the whole thing is so cool. 

Todd: Yeah. Well, I’ll, I’d kind of like to address a few of the things that you mentioned. I mean, number one, why did this movie do so poorly in the eighties? And I think if I can put myself back in the sensibility of where we were with movies, I think it’s probably just ’cause it was in the eighties.

I wanna say that now we are a lot more open, I think, to different kinds of movies, to people being a little playful with genre to movies that sort of subvert our expectations and, and mashed things up a little bit. But that’s not entirely true because the seventies were a big time period for film where there was a lot of this kind of experimentation going on, arguably way more than than today.

But I just think there was this period of time between the eighties and nineties where things started to kind of. Fall into neat little boxes, especially in the eighties. I mean, the eighties to me, at least in my recollection, but maybe I’m bi. Maybe it’s just my own personal experience. Were all about, it was an action movie or it was a like a war movie, like a Schwarzenegger type