THINK 1971 cloning film The Resurrection of Zachary Wheeler crossed with British sitcom George and Mildred about a middle-aged housewife and her miserable husband, and you are just about in the same curious ballpark as Honey Bunch.
Written and directed by Madeleine Sims-Fewer and Dusty Mancinelli, this old-school gothic horror screams Blue Nun and Old Spice with a dash of The Fall and Rise of Reginald Perrin for good measure – it is that seventies in style, right down to the brown corduroy and shag pile rugs.
A Shudder Original that is as horrifying as your granny’s avocado bathroom, the film opens with Diana (Grace Glowicki) being taken to an experimental trauma facility deep in the wilderness by her husband Homer (Ben Petrie). Diana has lost her memory after a car accident but as her recollection slowly begins to creep back, she becomes painfully aware of some rather unwelcome and sinister truths about her marriage.
Shot through an expansive and grandiose Kubrick-esque lens, Honey Bunch is a hallucinatory tale about love, loyalty, devotion, and how far we are willing to go for our significant others, as much as it is about the fake exteriors people put up. It also poses a rather vexing question in how well do we really know anybody?
A dark and unnerving horror, it could almost pass as a Hitchcockian attempt at body horror. It breaks no moulds, as confounding as it can be in large portions of the film. Somehow it’s the rather quaint, oddly familiar and unthreatening 1970s pastiche of it all that gives it a rather kooky old-school charm. I could almost taste the Babycham.
There’s a rather strange dreamlike quality throughout, if you are prone to dreaming about Frankenstein throttling the living daylights out of Morecambe and Wise.
Overall, Honey Bunch is a poignant film littered with many unremarkable and rather flimsy thrills. I’ve seen scarier episodes of Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?
(3/5)