Kiss Me Stupid is torture to sit through — the sexual hang-ups and uptight vibe of middle-class guilt, denial and jealousy creates a terrible feeling of imprisonment. The imaginary hamlet of Climax, Nevada is a ghastly sound-stage gulag. A joke is made at Dean Martin‘s expense about the Beatles, but the film totally misses the post-JFK assassination culture of ‘64, the year of the Beatles explosion, by focusing on a pair of lost-in-the-past songwriters (Ray Walston and that bear-like moustachioed guy, Cliff Osmond) who are as terrible as Warren Beatty and Dustin Hoffman in Ishtar, and on lechy, slurry-voiced Vegas hotshot Martin and poor, treated-like-dirt Kim Novak (i.e. “Polly the pistol”). Nobody wanted to think about Walston as a sexually active fellow.