Kiss Me Deadly was one of the last of the great true noir movies before Touch of Evil effectively destroyed the genre, but after Kiss Me Deadly there wasn’t much further for them to go. The noir had found its perfect topic in nuclear paranoia and had also become self-conscious, such that Kiss Me Deadly delivers its promised genre thrills while simultaneously acting as criticism of the direction hardboiled detective movies and books [had] taken. There are certainly more accomplished movies in the genre, both the slicker Hollywood prestige noirs from a decade earlier [but] Kiss Me Deadly is the picture that took the style as far as it could go without jumping into self-parody. In the years since its release, Kiss Me Deadly has been copied so many times that many of its boldest elements are familiar, but they’ve done little to dull its overall impact.
Synopsis: 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.