Kiss Me Deadly |  | Director: Robert Aldrich
Actors: Ralph Meeker, Albert Dekker, Paul Stewart, Juano Hernandez, Wesley Addy
Studio: MGM (Video & DVD)
Category: DVD
List Price: $14.98
Buy Used: $6.60
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Rating:  64 reviews
Format: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD, Letterboxed, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Languages: English (Original Language), Spanish (Subtitled), French (Subtitled)
Rating: Unrated
Region: 1
Aspect Ratio: 1.66:1
Number Of Discs: 1
Running Time: 106 Minutes
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.3
Dimensions (in): 7.4 x 5.1 x 0.6
ISBN: 0792850114
UPC: 027616862914
EAN: 9780792850113
Theatrical Release Date: May 18, 1955
Release Date: June 19, 2001
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Amazon.com essential video
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 Davis
Description
A brilliant film noir classic based on Mickey Spillane's bestseller, Kiss Me Deadly is masterfully directed by Robert Aldrich (The Dirty Dozen) and hailed as one of his best (Leonard Maltin). This DVD edition of Kiss Me Deadly features the fully restored original endingwhich contains over one minute of crucial footage that clarifies decades of false interpretations. In order to illustrate the vastly different impressions left by each version, the altered/shortened ending has been included as well. When callous thugs beat Mike Hammer (Ralph Meeker) senseless and viciously murder the gorgeous blonde he's been trying to help, the hard-boiled detective retaliates theonly way he can: by hitting first and asking questions later. Cutting a brutal swath through the city's sleazy underside, Hammer uncovers a mysterious black container whose deadly contents not only solve the murder...but trigger an apocalyptic climax as well!
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 64
Great Film Noir October 15, 2009
'1200' (Murfreesboro, TN)
Simply put, if you're into film noir, this is a movie to be revisited, or seen for the first time. No blockbuster actors, but everyone played their part well. A rather gritty movie considering it came out in the mid-50's. If you love nostalgia and are familiar with the LA area, you'll love the scenes shot on location.
What's always a good quality in any movie is a story you can follow, which you have here. It's the typical noir where a lot of smoking & drinking goes on, yet everyone's dressed up.
In short, a PI picks up a hitchhiker (Cloris Leechman!) that escaped from an insane asylum. She knows information that everyone's trying to find out. It's all about a box in a gym locker.
I found it especially interesting, recognizing a lot of the supporting cast (I watched a lot as a kid on Saturdays with dad). I also have a huge interest in Los Angeles past, so seeing the trolly car going up the hill, hotels downtown not there anymore, etc etc, was a big treat.
If film noir is your thing, don't pass this one up. Great stuff!
 Sordid and dislikable September 16, 2009
One-Line Film Reviews (Easton, MD)
The Bottom Line:
It may seem odd to criticize a film for being sordid when that's almost certainly the feel it was going for, but Kiss Me Deadly's incredible misanthropy and misogynism just kinda made me want to take a shower; also hampered by the fact that the central character of Mike Hammer never manages to be very interesting, Kiss Me Deadly is ultimately worth watching more for its influence on later films (e.g. Pulp Fiction, Raiders of the Lost Ark) than for its actual worth as a movie.
2.5/4
 "Va-va-voom!" straight to the Apocalypse June 5, 2009
William Timothy Lukeman
Some 50+ years later, this blistering film noir remains wonderfully subversive & disturbingly prescient. Its unflinchingly bleak & sardonic vision of an ostensibly civilized world sliding headfirst into gleeful barbarism rings even more true today, when anti-intellectualism & brute force are celebrated in public & political life. No wonder discerning French critics lauded it!
Ralph Meeker is perfect as Mike Hammer, the best excuse for a hero his world can muster -- a misogynistic, self-serving thug who relishes any opportunity to intimidate & humiliate others, all in the name of a fast & sleazy buck. (Although he clearly enjoys beating up others even if there isn't any cash in sight.) Anyone with the slightest inclination towards culture & basic human decency is doomed in this world. Hammer has no use for ambiguity, complexity, or depth. "Force is all they understand" -- and all he wants to understand.
There's an inexorable ferocity & drive to this film, as unlucky bystanders drop like flies & Hammer draws closer to the conclusion of his case. But unlike the traditional hero, the deeper he goes into the mystery he's struggling to unravel, the worse he makes things. And in the end, as the deadly Maguffin winds up in the very creepy hands of the vacuous but vicious Lily, we see that the proudly ignorant will not only inherit the earth, they'll probably destroy it, too.
Mickey Spillane fans won't be happy with this film -- Spillane himself hated it -- but director Rabert Aldrich has crafted a brilliant & savage parable for our times, one that seems all too accurate with each passing day. Highly recommended!
Taking The Hammer to L.A. November 10, 2008
EddieLove (NYC, USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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.
Kiss Me Deadly is Film Noir at Its Best. October 13, 2008
G. Merritt (Boulder, CO)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
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
Showing reviews 1-5 of 64
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