Paul (Nick Cornish) is driving along the great northwest with some serious gashes in his face looking for some police assistance. Since he’s all f’d up, the border cop, or whatever kind of cop this was asks the man to pop his trunk, which Paul does, but what Paul doesn’t know is that noted Broadway choreographer Bob Fosse is lying dead in his trunk, or at least the guy that played Bob Fosse in the recently late but completely great Roy Scheider. Thus the groundwork is laid in this contemporary thriller written and directed by one David O’Malley, ‘Dark Honeymoon’.

So what we know, as our man Paul is being wheeled into the interrogation room, is that there are a whole bunch of dead people at this motel where Paul and his lovely auburn haired bride Kathryn (Lindy Booth) were spending their most glorious honeymoon, and the cops are fairly convinced that Paul is their man. Now according to Paul, as he would tell FBI agent McCloud (Douglas Wert) who is handling the grilling, it wasn’t him. No sir, according to Paul it was his nutty as a fruitcake 96 pound bride, and he has quite the story to tell.

Though they’ve only known each other for all of three weeks, that’s apparently all it took for Paul and Kathryn to fall head over heels. Now one thing that struck me as peculiar is that Kathryn was being quite stingy with the poonanni, mainly because she’s a virgin and she wants to wait, which is completely commendable, but while the pair was walking along the beach and having a conversation Paul was learning all kinds of things about his new bride that he never knew before. My issue is since this pair wasn’t having sex during their dating phase, what exactly where they doing if not talking? Playing Xbox I guess. Just curious. Anyway, this is about the time that Paul has realized that he has married a crazed religious fanatic.

Things get a little weird, as Paul would tell our FBI agent, such as the sudden murder death of some obnoxious dude at a gas station played by the legendary Eric Roberts, Kathryn’s combustible reaction towards a couple of adulterers played by comedian Craig Shoemaker and a still hot at 48 Darryl Hannah, her equally combustible reaction towards a pair of horny kids shacking at the motel and her serious mistrust of an Opera singing hard rock musician training songstress played by Tia Carrere. Now Sam (Scheider), the wise proprietor of this motel of love, knows full well that something is wrong with Kathryn, but is anybody listening to him? Well since he opened the movie bleeding out in the trunk of a BMW we can assume the answer to that is no. The question is will the cops believe our poor hapless groom, or should they even?

So I’m watching this movie ‘Dark Honeymoon’, and quite honestly I’m thinking it’s a bit lackluster and generic while I’m watching it, but I’m waiting for ‘the twist’ because I know there has to be one. In this particular movie a real twist for me would’ve been if there were no twist, but yes there was a twist. If you watch a lot of movies you’ll observe there are two kinds of twists. There’s the clever twist, such as ‘The Sixth Sense’ which plays along with the story and when it’s revealed it makes total sense which allows the movie to go to end credits and leaves movie watcher satisfied. Then there’s the ‘outta left field’ twist, say like the twist in the movie ‘The Bone Collector’ which comes out of nowhere and probably requires another two hours of movie to explain why this plot twist is what it is. A slightly outta left field twist is what Mr. O’Malley has given us with ‘Dark Honeymoon’ and I can’t really say anything more as it would give too much away, but I was a bit underwhelmed.

Aside from the disappointment I felt when the twist was revealed, everything leading up to our conclusion was hit and miss. The movie had a very nice cast with vets E-Rob, Roy Scheider, Darryl Hannah and Tia Carrere doing fine work with the relatively small roles they had to work with, though the late Mr. Schneider did have fairly large chunk of screen time to chew through. Lindy Booth, who I last saw playing a strange red-headed girl in the movie ‘Cry Wolf’ apparently has that whole strange girl thing locked down pretty tight as she made for one fine psychopath in this movie. Part of this could be because she has this overly large pair of blue eyes that seem to big for her face and her eyebrows seem to missing which all give her a eerie ominous look. This and the fact the kid is a pretty good actress. Nick Cornish on the other hand didn’t fare quite as well with his character of Paul as his character wasn’t all that believable to me… but then… well we’re not going to spoil it for you, so maybe it was all part of the master plan.

‘Dark Honeymoon’ wasn’t that bad of a film, but as a thriller it didn’t have too many thrills and this was framed by a narrative that was generic and lackluster at best. It did have a very nice cast and this will be one the last times we get see Roy Scheider in action, but ‘Dark Honeymoon’ needed just a little more oomph to make it go.