Unlimitedia Sick Product of a Sick System

Fairaher The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

Calum Hutton It's a good bad... and worth a popcorn matinée. While it's easy to lament what could have been...

Guillelmina The film's masterful storytelling did its job. The message was clear. No need to overdo.

begob A private detective picks up a disturbed hitchhiker and sucks himself into a devilish plot ...Hugely pretentious noir, with very stylish direction but mostly plodding dialogue. The overall feel is of the East coast brought to the West coast, before it was the '60s. Ballet in leotards, Schubert played over the radio with a warm corpse in the room, a let-me-tell-you-how-I-did-it speech phrased in perfect classical mythology. A big flaw is the slow pace, which lets you dwell on the plot holes - fatal in the weird world of noir.The lead actor is brutish, and the females are dowdy. But the performances are solid, and there are plenty of good scenes - the stand out is at the pool-side, with the gangster bookies.Overall: I liked it, but the writing doesn't match the ambition.

dormantbae Movies like "Kiss Me Deadly" are reassuring that there's more to each genre than meets the eye. "Kiss Me Deadly" is part hard-boiled detective story & part apocalyptic sci-fi horror film. The movie suspects its own plots and its conventions are ludicrous. The result is a highly inventive film with a ridiculous but highly enjoyable storyline and comically fascinating characters.The basic plot, loosely adapted from Mickey Spillane's bestselling novel,is: after private-eye Mike Hammer picks up a hitchhiker who is later murdered, he becomes determined to learn the truth about her death. Although the plot becomes more and more insane, it's highly interesting. There are no empty twists, as each one leads to something larger and more confounding.I've never had more fun with a film noir character than the aptly named character of Mike Hammer. He isn't intimidated by any man and denies the world's hottest women. If he holds the upper hand in a situation, he seems virtually impenetrable. This characteristic leads to the ever-prevalent theme in film noirs of men vs. women and their places in relationships and society.The film is a masterpiece of cinematography, exhibited in the disorienting camera angles and unique and unconventional compositions of Ernest Laszlo. In fact, Ernesto Laszlo's cinematography is so apt with the film's randomness that it made me giddy.One of the most distinctive aspects of Kiss Me Deadly is the outrageousness of its final few seconds: the movie doesn't conclude, it detonates. In the hands of the director Robert Aldrich, the film becomes a starting point for a delirious expression of 1950s anxiety and paranoia, starting with opening credits that run backwards and ending with an atomic explosion.

treywillwest This film could fairly be deemed as fascist-noir. If often misogynistic, noir is rarely this brazenly phalocentric. Mike Hammer (yup, really the character's name) is a seducer of women and abuser of both genders. The audience is to applaud his every bullying gesture. The many women in the film exist to move the plot along and/ or to worship Hammer as a sex-God. He, like all good entrepreneurial Americans, is humbled only when he learns that some "alien" may be getting its hands on the destructive power that America alone is "supposed" to wield. Having said all that, I must guiltily confess my love for this film. Shot, it seems, almost entirely on location, it transports one to the lost LA of the early '50s. And, if Hammer, um, rams his way through all forms of otherness, he still encounters many forms of it on a dazzling tour through the underbelly of 1950s American urbanity. For all that is reactionary about the film, it contains strikingly unracist depictions of African-Americans compared to many other films of its era.

PWNYCNY The Maltese Falcon and Kiss Me Deadly are similar in that both movies open with a young, attractive, and mysterious young woman randomly entering the life of the main protagonist which triggers a series of events revolving around a McGuffin. But whereas The Maltese Falcon can be taken seriously, the same cannot be said for Kiss Me Deadly. Kiss Me Deadly is pure camp. In this movie, the caricature of the aggressive, pushy, anti-law, anti-hero, no-nonsense, amoral tough guy is perfected. Mike Hammer is "one of those self-indulgent males who thinks about nothing but his clothes, his car, himself." Ralph Meeker's performance as Hammer must be rated as one of the greatest performances in the history of film noir. Meeker sets the standard for this type of role. The film's screenwriter, A. I. Bezzerides, wrote the script for fun. Bezzerides said, "People ask me about the hidden meanings in the script, about the A-bomb, about McCarthyism, what does the poetry mean, and so on. And I can only say that I didn't think about it when I wrote it . . . I was having fun with it." The idea of a medical doctor lugging around a box containing a mysterious and dangerous thing that is "hot", or of a harried, disheveled gumshoe repeatedly screwing up, or of the same gumshoe barging into a health club and demanding to look inside some guy's locker, or of the gumshoe possessing what may be the single largest and gaudiest personal telephone answering machine in history, or of the gumshoe having a girlfriend that's part-secretary, part-confidante, part-lover and completely a whore, or of the gumshoe's best friend being an auto mechanic who looks, sounds, and acts like Jerry Colonna, or of the gumshoe driving around in expensive sports cars had to be written for laughs. It is virtually impossible to take such scenes or props seriously. If this movie has any message, it is to sit back, relax, watch it and enjoy it.