Even Mario Bava’s succinctly titled horror “Hatchet for the Honeymoon” 54 years ago did not imagine a more vividly unpleasant entrée to wedlock than “Crumb Catcher,” Chris Skotchdopole’s feature directorial bow. In this mix of home-invasion thriller and grotesque comedy, a just-hitched young couple already on each other’s last nerves are surprised by uninvited visitors, causing the night to go from bad to very much worse. If you can withstand spending nearly two hours in the company of these grating, argumentative characters, there are rewards to be had in a skillfully wrought, twisty suspense tale that releases to limited U.S. theaters on July 19.
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Introduced posing for photos immediately after their wedding, Shane (Rigo Garay) and Leah (Ella Rae Peck) do not appear to be much of a love match. He’s clearly discomfited by the high-end surroundings, which her otherwise disapproving parents apparently bankrolled; she unthinkingly “corrects” his every spoken thought. But then their union may be more professional than passionate in gist: She works in publicity for a publisher that’s gearing up the hype machine to launch his first book.
When his newly anointed mother-in-law snubs him — presumably not for the first time — Shane stomps off, waking the next morning still in his tuxedo, a hangover clouding any recall of the interim hours. The irked bride orders him to the car so they can drive upstate to a posh loaner vacation home for their honeymoon. An already tense mood is heightened when he airs serious misgivings about the autobiographical tome they’ve labored over for five years, fearing it will cause relatives undue pain. Ambitious careerist Leah isn’t buying that argument. But then she spies a car outside.
Incongruously turning up in this remote location is John (John Speredakos), an unctuous waiter who’d already pestered them at the prior day’s big event. He’s ostensibly followed them here to deliver a tardy wedding cake. But ignoring their obvious annoyance, he won’t leave, windbagging his way toward a convoluted mix of crackpot salesmanship and blackmail that also involves his own pushily unpleasant spouse Rose (Lorraine Farris) — who initially waits in the car outside, and was also present at the wedding.
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They are a pair of would-be con artists so garishly vaudevillian, they might be summer-stock versions of the ne’er-do-wells Tim Curry and Bernadette Peters played in the first film version of musical “Annie.” The sun won’t come out tomorrow here, however. Instead, there’s a long night of veiled threats and escalating weirdness that inevitably takes a violent turn.
While the performers (most veterans of prior works by producer Larry Fessenden) are fine, their characters’ discordant dynamics don’t exactly deepen as this macabre miniature goes on. “Crumb Catcher” could have just as satisfyingly explored its premise within the limitations of a short. But Skotchdopole’s direction does maintain enough tension, and his screenplay provide enough complications, to keep viewers entertained by the four-handed trainwreck. There’s even a smidgen of poignance in the late going, when outright war between the two couples takes the form of a dangerously inebriated vehicular chase on curvy rural roads. We may not care a great deal about these uniformly rather unsympathetic figures, but their final metamorphosis into a circular firing squad does generate a degree of pathos.
Shot in New York’s Hudson Valley, the film deftly makes the most of modest resources, its psychological conflicts taut enough that you don’t miss the physical action that’s absent until the final 20 minutes or so. It helps that the primary setting, that borrowed modernist country manse (with artwork to match), provides an aspirational model underlining the characters’ class differences. Nonetheless, while divertingly nasty as far as it goes, “Crumb Catcher” hardly probes deep or says anything meaningful enough to support a press kit Director’s Statement that it provides a “cautionary tale” about the current state of “the American Dream.”
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