Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly
by Robert Aldrich
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Product details
Actor: Albert Dekker, Juano Hernandez, Paul Stewart, Ralph Meeker, Wesley AddyDirector: Robert Aldrich
Edition: VHS Tape
Audio: English (Original Language), Analog
Format: NTSC
Audience Rating: Unrated
VHS Movie Reviews of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly
Movie Review: Taking The Hammer to L.A.
Summary: 4 Stars
Mike Hammer is transplanted to the left coast in this overrated but entertaining cult classic. Rather than being a two-fisted gumshoe, here Mike does sleazy divorce work and practically pimps out Velda. The picture starts off strong, but sinks into a very convoluted plot. The thrills come from the ahead-of-it's-time violence -- some of the most sadistic of which is handed out by Hammer. The picture also takes the cynisism of 50s noir and extends that to the political climate with it's much vaunted apocalyptic ending. This seems to lay the groundwork for 70s thrillers like Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor with their paranoia and suspicion.
Meeker's okay, but the picture might play better if the other women were as good as Cloris Leachman in the opening scenes.
Movie Review: Kiss Me Deadly is Film Noir at Its Best.
Summary: 5 Stars
American film director Robert Aldrich (1918-1983) is synonymous with great films like What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), Hush...Hush, Sweet Charlotte (1964), and The Dirty Dozen (1967). Based on the Mickey Spillane pulp mystery bestseller of the same name, Aldrich's 1955 film noir classic, Kiss Me Deadly, stars Ralph Meeker as lowlife Los Angeles gumshoe, Mike Hammer, on a quest for "something big." The fact that this B movie was the inspiration for later films including Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), Alex Cox's Repo Man (1984), Tarantino's Pulp Fiction (1994), and David Lynch's Lost Highway (1997) is reason enough to add Kiss Me Deadly to one's film collection.
As film noir, Kiss Me Deadly is so dark it is arguably nihilistic. It opens with a young woman, Christina (Cloris Leachman), hitchhiking in her bare feet and a trench coat along a lonely road. After catching a ride with hard-boiled detective Mike Hammer, she is tortured to death by thugs fifteeen minutes later. Soon anti-hero Hammer finds himself outside the comfort zone of the sleazy divorce cases he typically investigates, and at the center of a international intrigue. The darkly-sinister, fast-paced thriller ends with an over-the-top atomic blaze. Meeker carries the film, and this fully-restored DVD edition features both the original ending and the alternate ending of Kiss Me Deadly. Highly recommended.
G. Merritt
Movie Review: Film noir, yes, Mickey Spillane, no
Summary: 4 Stars
I admit to liking this movie. Spillane hated it and what Aldrich did to the character of Mike Hammer, turning from a violent angel of retribution to simply a violent and not too bright thug. The ending (or endings if you like) have to be the strangest ever for a film noir.Movie Review: Influential
Summary: 3 Stars
I will not talk about the plot, as the story took some interesting turns that came as a pleasant surprise. The movie drags at points, but is fun overall. The look of the film has clearly been a big influence on many films - from Lost Highway to Repo Man and Raiders of the Lost Ark, but it is the slightly surreal night scenes that have the most impact and constantly reminded me of the works of David Lynch.
The dvd print is average quality, a little murky at times. The dvd itself is bare bones with just a trailer and an alternate ending, which is mostly the same but truncated.
Movie Review: Noir as Horror Film.
Summary: 5 Stars
'Kiss Me Deadly' has a far nastier edge than we are used to seeing from the mid-fifties. I won't say much, because I don't want to give away any surprises (and there are a fair number of them) - but the beginning and the end of this movie are both remarkable and have a distinctly nightmarish quality to them. "Remember me." Just TRY to forget!
I wasn't sure how I felt about Ralph Meeker on first viewing, but, seeing this again, his performance has grown on me. Certainly it helps when you know what to expect. This incarnation of Spillane's Mike Hammer character is no hero, but something far more ambiguous. Whether slapping people around, pressuring his girl to essentially prostitute herself, putting his friends in harms way or just generally being a creep, he makes an uncomfortable audience identifier, and that goes a long way toward making 'Kiss Me Deadly' the edgy and bizarre experience that it is.
Aldrich was proving here that, as a director, he was something else. There are a great many virtuoso scenes and things coming out of left field to keep the audience off balance. Great stuff!
Summary of Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me Deadly
Kiss Me Deadly starts off with a bang--a young woman (Cloris Leachman) in bare feet and a trench coat runs along a highway, frantically trying to flag down help. In desperation, she finally throws herself into traffic, and the car she stops belongs to detective Mike Hammer. The pace never lets up--we're not even 15 minutes into the movie and there's already been a murder, a mysterious letter, an attempt to kill Hammer, and, of course, a warning to just stay out of it. Hammer, tired of lowlife divorce cases, smells something big and can't let it go. The film is exciting, about as dark as a noir can get, and full of skewed camera angles and mysterious whose-shoes-are-those shots. At the center, of course, is Mike Hammer, a detective so cool he can win a fight with nothing more than a box of popcorn as a weapon. Hammer knows his opera singers as well as his amateur prizefighters, and he makes the ladies swoon, but he's far from a conventional hero. In fact, he's rather emphatically not a nice guy; Hammer happily whores out his secretary-girlfriend Velma to cinch up those divorce cases and has a penchant for slamming other people's fingers in drawers. Even the bad guys know he's a sleazebag. ("What's it worth to you to turn your considerable talents back to the gutter you crawled out of?") Ralph Meeker plays Hammer's ambivalence brilliantly, swinging easily between sexy and just plain mean. Kiss Me Deadly is just terrific. Stop reading this review and watch it already. --Ali DavisFilm Noir Video
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