Quartile rating: 7.5/10 · 1 rating
One evening, Hammer gives a ride to Christina, an attractive hitchhiker on a lonely country road, who has escaped from the nearby lunatic asylum. Thugs waylay them and force his car to crash. When Hammer returns to semi-consciousness, he hears Christina being tortured until she dies. Hammer, both for vengeance and in hopes that "something big" is behind it all, decides to pursue the case.
Kiss Me Deadly is one of the most audacious and singular noirs ever made. Robert Aldrich's direction is ferociously kinetic, with cinematographer Ernest Laszlo delivering expressionistically tilted angles and deep-shadow compositions that feel genuinely threatening. The plot escalates from hardboiled detective yarn into proto-apocalyptic sci-fi nightmare — the infamous 'great whatsit' MacGuffin predates similar conceits by decades and remains shocking. The ending, with its Pandora's Box nuclear cataclysm, is an extraordinary and genuinely disturbing conclusion, almost without precedent in Hollywood genre cinema of the era. Acting is competent and atmospheric but Meeker's Hammer is more brutish cipher than fully inhabited performance, keeping that category from the top tier. Novelty is very high: no other film of the period arrives at the same place from the same direction.