Rating: 
Summary: EMOTIONAL VIOLENCE!
Review: "EMOTIONAL VIOLENCE!" shrieks the trailer to Samuel Fuller's 1964 B-movie extravaganza "The Naked Kiss," and you'll believe that claim eventually even though it initially causes a snicker. Fuller, arguably more than any other American director of the time, helped push Hollywood far beyond the staid, cookie cutter studio productions of the 1930s, 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. Here's a film that is a real envelope pusher, a film that deals with themes that must have absolutely shocked audiences of the 1960s to the core of their being. Heck, "The Naked Kiss" still has the power to shock today, and that's saying something about a black and white film that is now forty years old. Fuller, who had begun challenging film audiences much earlier with such films as "Pickup on South Street" and "Shock Corridor," went on to produce, write, and direct other notable films. Before watching "The Naked Kiss," the only Fuller picture I knew about was his homage to the fighting men of World War II, 1980's "The Big Red One." According to information gleaned during several Internet excursions, the French in particular embraced Fuller even as American audiences forgot about him. The recent DVD explosion is sure to rekindle a love for the man's films on this side of the Atlantic.
We see a good deal of that emotional violence--as well as a dose of physical violence--in the opening scenes of "The Naked Kiss," as an aging yet still attractive harridan named Kelly (Constance Towers) pummels her pimp senseless with a high-heeled shoe. She's striking out on her own, taking a sum of money from her now prostrate boss in order to make her escape. Kelly feels that the years of abuse and degradation have rendered her useless and decrepit, and she hopes a new start will restore a modicum of her youthful zest for life. Two years later, we see our heroine stepping off a bus in Grantville, U.S.A., a place that makes "Leave it to Beaver" look like South Central Los Angeles. This town is so saccharine, so picture perfect in that 1950s Hollywood way that you start to wonder exactly where Fuller is taking us. Not to worry. Kelly immediately runs into police detective Griff (Anthony Eisley), a man who hangs around the bus station all day picking up women like Kelly. We also learn that Griff exploits these women by first luring them into a physical encounter before sending them off to a brothel owner named Candy (Virginia Grey). Kelly knows none of this at the start, but she learns quickly after Griff slips her a twenty for the time they spend together. Our woman is appalled at her lapse, so much so that she swears off the life forever and takes up work as a nurse at a local hospital for disabled children.
Things start looking up for Kelly after she takes her new position at the hospital. The hapless souls in her charge buoy her flagging spirits, making her feel as though she's really contributing something to the world. She also gets the opportunity to help out a few women, Dusty (Karen Conrad) and Buff (Marie Devereux), caught up in similar problems she once faced. But the best aspect of Kelly's transformation from harridan to hospital hero is the attention she receives from Grant (Michael Dante), Grantville's primary philanthropist and a beloved figure around town. This guy heaps praise on Kelly, wooing her with his fancy friends, gifts picked up in foreign lands, and his forgiving nature. Even after Grant learns about Kelly's past, in no small part due to Griff's interference, he still offers to marry her. Things couldn't seem better, right? It's around this point that Fuller drops the cinematic equivalent of a nuclear bomb into the proceedings. Towers's character discovers a shocking secret concerning Grant and the town's children, a secret so devastating that she lashes out at her fiancé and accidentally kills him. Her new life shatters as every enemy, and even every friend, she has comes out of the woodwork to excoriate her. It's only through a few lucky breaks that Kelly clears herself of a murder charge, but she must leave Grantville with her reputation in tatters.
I watched "The Naked Kiss" with my girlfriend, and we had a grand time with Fuller's seedy film. We roared, guffawed, and giggled through roughly the first hour of the film. How could we not? The dialogue is hilarious, those children singing in the hospital will make you howl with pain, and Kelly's hard as nails behavior is a real hoot. You simply must love the scene where she charges into the local brothel in order to batter a squawking and squealing Candy into submission. Go get 'em, Kelly! And that mannequin in her room where she stays after first arriving in Grantville! Oh brother! Yep, "The Naked Kiss" is a real trashy laughfest--until Fuller drops the bomb. When Grant's true nature comes to light, my girlfriend and I quit laughing in a hurry. From this point until the end of the movie, you could have heard a pin drop in my living room. As the credits roll, it becomes abundantly clear that Fuller made a masterpiece. Any film that can change gears so effectively, essentially turning cinematic conventions of the time on their head in the process, deserves our praise.
The Criterion Collection again performs miracles bringing a screen classic to DVD. The picture quality looks amazing for such an old film. Unfortunately, you'll need to pick up Criterion's version of Fuller's "Pickup on South Street" if you want plenty of extras, as the only bonus included here is the EMOTIONAL VIOLENCE! trailer. "The Naked Kiss" is a must see film, and one that will stay with me for some time. I'm grateful to an online friend who really knows cinema for inspiring me to check this marvelous gem out.
Rating: 
Summary: Dark doings in small-town America
Review: Beyond the "exploitation movie" premise and several admittedly effective "shock" scenes, this movie delivers a pretty good story about a prostitute moving to a small town and attempting to live a more traditional life. I liked the way the main character wasn't a typical movie prostitute with a heart of gold, but a tough, hardened woman with a heart of steel. The character's toughness both helps and hinders her as she confronts several bizarre situations in a small town not as wholesome and "apple pie" as it first seems. One wonders if this film was an inspiration for David Lynch's "Blue Velvet", probably the most famous movie examining the theme of image versus reality in small-town America. There aren't many extras on this DVD (unusual for Criterion), but the print is fabulous.
Rating: 
Summary: Whatever you were expecting....
Review: doesn't prepare you for the musical number halfway through the picture. Jarring is perhaps the best description. Just roll with it and enjoy the denouement.
Rating:
Summary: Whatever you were expecting....
Review: doesn't prepare you for the musical number halfway through the picture. Jarring is perhaps the best description. Just roll with it and enjoy the denouement.
Rating: 
Summary: So bad its...bad.
Review: Don't get me wrong; I like trash. But this manages to be both very dull and very over the top at the same time. Constance Towers is ok (its no wonder she ended up doing soaps; she has that "almost convincing" way of acting). Anthony Eisley is fair. The movie has some of the absolute worst, terrible, shockingly bad child actors imaginable. The bad acting, fake streets and sets, stereotypical characters and sheer length make this painful. Nothing rings true enough to take it seriously--but how can you laugh at crippled children and child molesters? Its like Roger Corman without the fun. Worth seeing--maybe--but how people can attach such importance to imcompetant schlock.....
Rating:
Summary: So bad its...bad.
Review: Don't get me wrong; I like trash. But this manages to be both very dull and very over the top at the same time. Constance Towers is ok (its no wonder she ended up doing soaps; she has that "almost convincing" way of acting). Anthony Eisley is fair. The movie has some of the absolute worst, terrible, shockingly bad child actors imaginable. The bad acting, fake streets and sets, stereotypical characters and sheer length make this painful. Nothing rings true enough to take it seriously--but how can you laugh at crippled children and child molesters? Its like Roger Corman without the fun. Worth seeing--maybe--but how people can attach such importance to imcompetant schlock.....
Rating:
Summary: Awesome!
Review: From the opening shots of a woman beating a man with a high heeled pump, you know this is going to be fun...Costance Towers plays a prostitute who, in an attempt to reform herself and settle down, moves to perfect, small-town suburbia. Of course, after living there for a bit, she realizes what everyone who lives in suburbia already knows: It is no less corrupt and nasty than the streets. I don't have this version of the DVD, but the Criterion Collection edition is superb.
Rating:
Summary: The double moral
Review: Fuller gave us a ravishing work. plenty of kinetic energy, without anu pause, directly he engages the viewer, around a prostitute who refuses making that job, and to establish in another land with the illusion of reborn with a new name and profession.
She turns in nurse and works in a hospital. she's very pretty and soon she'll meet a man who ask for her to marry him.
Suddenly she finds out awful who'll give her life a twist of fate.
You are the judge and make your own opinion. But meanwhile her past is known by the little neighborhood and you can imagine what that means.
After inquiring her, she'll be free, but she'll let the town, because it doesn't deserve the efforts made for her.
Fuller established this bitter film just in the middle of the sixties in a world shocked by high tension : Vietnam's war, Kennedy's murder, and the racial issues.
May be this was the main reason why this film was underrated. Too much high point temperature in the social body of USA in that moment. Please notice the films awarded by the Academy in that age, there were elusive pictures, think it Mary Poppins, My fair Lady, Tom Jones , Irma la dulce , for avoid to remind the troubled state of things for that special moment.
However the film has prevailed and thanks to the efforts of Criterion it's possible to appreciatte this cult movie.
Don't miss this one.
Rating:
Summary: I HATE BRIAN DEPALMA
Review: Fuller's best film. Well acted and brutally honest. A cop out ending can't even spoil this fine, fine film. By the way did I mention I hate Brian Depalma...Oliver Stone too. Neither one had anything to do with this film which makes it even better. But check out Oliver Stone's cameo in the Troma classic Battle Of Love's Return. That movie sucked. But seriously, Naked Kiss is an essential part of any video collection.
Rating: 
Summary: IS THIS SOMETHING, OR WHAT?
Review: I mean, you've got to like a movie that begins with bald hooker beating her pimp senseless with her shoe, don't you? And it just gets jucier, as, hair restored, she moves to a small town full of crippled kids, crooked cops, and child molesters. All this, and some color footage from director Sam Fuller's home movies and snippets of poetry and Beethoven, too. The acting is fairly wretched (any movie where the best performance is given by Anthony Eisley is dire indeed), the sets are cheap, and the music is pretty bad, but it was nicely photographed by Stanley Cortez, who must have been wondering as he worked on this masterpiece if this was the same career that began by shooting Welles' THE MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS. This film has a big reputation in Europe, but as film critic Andrew Sarris once noted, Europeans experience orgasms at the thought of Americans committing suicide en masse--like lemmings . . .
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