Vashirdfel Simply A Masterpiece

FeistyUpper If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

Konterr Brilliant and touching

BelSports This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

Robert J. Maxwell It's a coherent narrative, I guess, and it's not insulting to anyone's intelligence or basic sense of morality. It's just an assault on one's aesthetic apparatus. My eyeballs felt coagulated after half watching this junk and half snoozing through it.Mickey Spillane plays Mike Hammer, a character he created in some pulp fiction novels of the early 50s. They achieved a certain notoriety at the time. When Private Eye Mike Hammer plugs a beautiful babe in the belly at the end of "I, The Jury," she gasps, "Mike, how could you do this?" And Mike snarls, "It was easy." Well, you don't have to be a literary giant to write hard-boiled pulp fiction. It has a long, if mostly undistinguished, history. Dashiell Hammett gave us a couple of good stories, most notably "The Maltese Falcon." Sam Spade went down in history. Hammett had a fascinating detective story to tell and lots of local San Francisco color. You can still order the Sam Spade Special at Jack's Restaurant, and there is a bronze plaque on the street corner where Miles Archer was killed.Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe brought a touch of street poetry with him in his anfractuous adventures in Los Angeles. "Her hair was the color of gold in old painting." And, "She gave me a look that I could feel in my hip pocket." I could never follow Chandler's stories and neither could Chandler but what the hell.Mickey Spillane was different from these earlier stars. He didn't have an interesting story to tell and he'd have to look up "poetry" in the dictionary. The novels were just forgettable junk, like most of the stories in the pulp magazines of the 30s and 40s, with titles like, "Somewhere a Roscoe" and "The Dead Blond." The movie is about as good as his novel -- or it would be if author Mickey Spillane did not play his own hero, Mike Hammer. The guy is bulky and squinty eyed and shapeless. He has the voice of a really bad teacher of algebra. Not even the glossy Shirley Eaton can compensate for his presence or for the absence of an involving narrative. It has something to do with his finding his secretary, Velda or Velma. The story begins with Hammer as an abject drunk picked up and beaten by the cops, but it's impossible to tell the difference between Hammer as drunk and Hammer as reinvigorated private eye.The sound is scratchy, the photography wretched, and the musical score infinitely repetitive -- a bluesy trumpet with four notes in its repertoire. The director seems to know what a loser he's got here because he makes no attempt to dress up this dreck. Hammer enters a seedy saloon on his quest and you can tell it's seedy because somebody is playing a honky tonk piano in the background as if this were Dodge City.The good part is I awoke refreshed and alert after that brief nap.

dgz78 This movie is a perfect illustration that good dialog in a book doesn't necessarily translate to good dialog in film. When one reads a line like "They just don't make dragons like they used to" it doesn't sound a corny as it does when spoken by a wooden Mickey Spillane.And the biggest problem isn't that Mickey Spillane is such a bad actor - it's that his is not the worst performance in the movie. Only Lloyd Nolan manages to sound like he's not reading lines off the back of a cereal box. Especially bad performances are put in by Hy Gardner as a newspaper columnist and Scott Peters' over the top job as a police captain and former partner of Hammer. At least Gardner has an excuse since he wasn't a professional actor like Peters. Shirley Eaton models a wide range of bikinis and is always easy on the eyes if not on the brain.Like any good pulp fiction, the plot of The Girl Hunters is besides the point. Hammer's old secretary Velda plays the role of the macguffin and Hammer spends his time trying to follow her trail and the murder of a politician. The end comes without us ever finding out what happened to Velda but it really doesn't matter. This movie is all style and no substance so we really never care about Velda.No Mike Hammer film is going to be make anyone forget Shakespeare but this is really a waste of time. I give it two stars only because the cinematography is good and Nolan shows what a real actor can do.Finally, why did they black out the credit at the end of the movie stating it was filmed at MGM studios in England? A strange ending to a strange mess of a movie.

RanchoTuVu Mike Hammer (Mickey Spillane) is found drunk and passed out by a police cruiser in an alley; he's taken to excessive drinking since the abduction of his girlfriend and secretary Velma, and is no good to himself or anyone else. Given a second chance and a new license to carry his cannon like .45 by new-found friend and FBI agent Rickerby (Lloyd Nolan) he sets out to find Velma and in the process meets the beautiful Laura Knapp (Shirley Eaton) who he first sees in her bikini as she's getting a suntan on an inflated raft in her pool. She makes a good femme fatale and has a neat seduction scene with him in her dark living room one night. Rickerby puts Hammer on the trail of "The Dragon" (Larry Taylor) a Soviet killer who might be connected to Velma's disappearance as well. The plot is difficult to follow, names are tossed out, and the viewer's job is to try and connect the dots. The pace is all right, directed by veteran Roy Rowland, and Spillane, though he isn't Olivier, grows on you as the film heads into a surprisingly violent ending.

woid You know the moment in "The Producers" when the Broadway theatre audience sits stupefied by the unbelievable awfulness of what they're seeing? I watched most of "The Girl Hunters" with a similar slack-jawed, eye-popping expression.The ultimate vanity project, in which Mickey Spillane stars as his own ultra-macho detective, Mike Hammer. And, he's miscast! He can't act, can barely deliver his own awful dialogue, and is laughably terrible throughout the movie. Even better, Mickey cast his also-can't-act pals in supporting roles. The tabloid columnist Hy Gardner never met a line of dialogue he couldn't butcher. Lloyd Nolan phones it in, looking like he's ready for the laxative commercials he would soon be doing. And then there are the assorted slabs of beef who pound Hammer and get pounded by him, in the trademark sadomasochistic Spillane style.Of course he gets the girl (Shirley Eaton!!!). In fact, the most unwatchable shot in the whole movie is the slow track to a closeup of their mouths as they make out for the first time. I dare you not to blink.And then there's the music! Laid on with a trowel, it's the same over-orchestrated catchy trumpet blues riff repeated a hundred times, usually crescendoing over a meaningless shot of Hammer walking down a hall, or driving up a road, punctuating exactly the wrong moments in a film that's just chock full of 'em.Only 103 minutes, but I would have guessed two hours. Grill a steak, pour a scotch, fire up a cancer stick, and don't miss it!!