The Girl Hunters (1963)
Oh how we love to discover and uncover the oddest of long lost forgotten films.
This one's about as odd and forgotten as any movie can get......
"The Girl Hunters", at the very least, should've earned a paragraph in the Guiness Book of World Records. Why?
Unless someone finds another film where a thriller novelist played his own fictional creation, then this one stands as the record holder.
Yep, you heard that right. Tough-as-nails Private Eye Mike Hammer is played by.....tough-as-nails pulp mystery writer Mickey Spillane.....(who as far we know is the only writer who played one of his characters on film......until maybe somebody one day unearths a lost Miss Marple movie starring Agatha Christie.....)
The oddities don't stop there. The film is actually British, produced and shot in England with only a few brief glimpses of New York streets....and loaded up with Brit actors flattening out their enunciations to sound American.
Now you're dying to know......how weird and/or bad and/or embarrassing is Mickey as Hammer?
Got news for ya.......he ain't bad. Maybe Richard Burton wouldn't lose any sleep over Spillane's entry into cinema, but let's face it.....Mike Hammer, the free-with-his-fists-and-a-45 gumshoe was born to be played by the guy who birthed him.
Spillane, a chunky lug with a hook nose and a monotone speaking voice begins the film drunk, disheveled and disheartened. Hammer's on the skids from the disappearance of his beloved secretary and Gal Friday Velda......and he's on the outs with his one time police detective pal Pat Chambers (Scott Peters). (seems they both had the hots for Velda).
Chambers and a Fed (Lloyd Nolan) send Hammer off to find out who killed a U.S. senator, which leads to the senator's hubba-hubba be-still-my-heart widow Laura. (Lucious blonde Shirley Eaton, only a year away from a gold paint job in "Goldfinger")
The convoluted plot twists finally lead Hammer to an especially brutal extended brawl with a Russian assassin dubbed 'The Dragon'. (This exhausting, bloody punch-a-thon makes the Connery-Shaw "From Russia With Love" train fight look like child's play). At one point, Hammer considers axing the guy's head off,but settles for subduing him by literally nailing his hand to the floor.....ouch....)
Fans of pulpy noir should really eat up film's abrupt but truly memorable moment, when the surprise twist villain meets a spectacular gory fate that's left offscreen but was previously predicted by Hammer in graphic detail......(which no doubt goosed up the audience's imagination when it happens for real.
And what the hell became of Velda? Don't ask....'cause the screenwriters didn't ask either....
Nobody should expect the iconic cinematic flourishes that director Robert Aldrich brought to his own Hammer whammer, 1955's "Kiss Me Deadly". Overall, with the exception of that fight scene and climactic close, "The Girl Hunters" never rises above its low-budget, low ambition place in the world - at the bottom half of a double feature.
But it does boast the unique slogan "Mickey Spillane IS Mike Hammer!".......an author-creation combo like no other movie you're likely to see.
2 & 1/2 stars (**1/2).
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