Kill me. Please.

Quentin Tarantino is a great director, but let's face facts here. Even George Lucas had Howard the Duck. Am I saying KIll Bill, Volume 1 is as bad as Howard the Duck? No my friends. Kill Bill, Volume 1 was much, much worse.

For the record, I'm going to refer to this movie as Kill Bill. Yes I know it was a two parter, and Kill Bill, Volume 2 was not to be perceived as a sequel, but rather a contiuation of this rather long, excrutiating, hot, steaming, dump of a story. This review for the most part however, covers Kill Bill, Volume 1, because frankly, Volume 2 was so uninteresting, bland and tedious that I would rather play in traffic than relive that nightmare through essay.

Many of you right now are thinking that I'm not a fan of his work. This couldn't be further from the truth. I thoroughly enjoyed Pulp Fiction. I thought Reservoir Dogs and True Romance were also brilliant films (although I've heard Reservoir Dogs was pillaged from an old Asian film), and I even found From Dusk til' Dawn entertaining.

While Tarantino has always been a student of film, borrowing ideas, camera shots, action sequences, and even whole stories, Kill Bill is nothing more than a blatant rape of every Bruce Lee movie ever made. Perhaps it may viewed as a tribute to the great martial artists legacy, but it's hard for me to see it as anything other than Tarantino not being able to create an original concept of his own.

Kill Bill like many of Tarantino's movies is not told in sequential order and is loaded with flash backs. We meet the Bride, played by Uma Thurman. I am still baffled to this day how Hollywood has deemed her a sex symbol. She is anything but. In fact she is butt. I digress. The Bride's wedding is interrupted by Bill and his gang of bad asses who slaughter the entire wedding party, and complete the ceremony with a bullet to her head. This sets the stage for this revenge plot that will later follow the framework already layed by Bruce Lee's last movie, the 1978 Game of Death.

We later find the Bride, comatose in a hospital bed. Darryl Hannah, Tarantino's latest reclamation project arrives on the scene in the form of a nurse....or rather impersonating a nurse. Hannah plays Elle Driver, and like John Travolta as Vincent Vega in Pulp Fiction, has signed on as attempt to jump start her career....which has been on life-support for over a decade (I can only assume that Lorraine Gary of Jaws: The Revenge is waiting by the telephone for Tarantino to call). Unlike Travolta however, these days, Darryl Hannah is virtually unrecognizable. Yes the eye patch she wears during Kill Bill does conceal her identity to an extent, but not as much as the plastic surgery that has altered her once mermaid like features. One can only surmise that her doctor was Bob Villa, and he treated her cheek bones like Home Depot's economy priced faux marble tile while resurfacing a half bathroom on the set of 'This Old House'. Women should just try and age gracefully rather than have some cocaine enhanced Beverly Hills surgeon mine their faces with a pick axe.

I have digressed again. Nurse Driver, while in the process of assassinating the Bride with some cocktail in a needle receives a call from Bill, instructing her to abort the assassination. She leaves, and hours later, during an attempted rape by one of the orderlie's pals, the Bride awakes from her coma, and the revenge plot commences.

She cuts a path through Bill's posse, beginning with Vivica Fox who plays Vernita Green, and is cleverly codenamed after some type of snake (this theme is carried out through all of Bill's death squad). The Bride and Green have a wonderful knife fight in a living room beautifully furnished by Crate and Barrel, and proceed to the kitchen where they share a cup of coffee and compare ovary size. Green attempts to blind side her with 'the old pistol through the frosted flakes trick', but misses like Han Solo in Star Wars, and ends up with a knife in her sternum brilliantly deposited from a toss by the Bride. NEXT!

After receiving some information from Green, up next is a trip to Japan, where she will get the perfect weapon in which she may continue her 'Game of Death' revenge plot. Who should fashion this sword for her? None other than martial arts legend Sonny Chiba. I figure from all the ideas and storylines Tarantino has stolen from him the least he could do was offer him this throw away role. Chiba plays Hattori Hanzo, who is apparently the Boston Market of sword making (I have no idea what that analogy means, but I'm running with it) and his blades are coveted among Bill's elite cadre. After the bride tells Hanzo her tale of woe, he agrees to fashion her a new sword. YAY! Let's return to ripping off Bruce Lee.

Not only is the story ripped from Lee's movies, but Uma now sports a replica of the jumpsuit he wore in Game of Death. Tarantino having pillaged that movie enough, turns to the Chinese Connection and re-enacts the scene where Bruce Lee fights an entire dojo. The Bride in this scene battles O-Ren Ishii's gang of bad guys. The Crazy 88's. Essentially a group of men dressed like Kato from The Green Hornet television series. Yet another Bruce Lee project and character. Shifting to black and white for no reason (perhaps to recieve an 'R' rating rather than a 'NC17', although some assholes would call this creative license), the Bride dispatches the gang, and proceeds up the stairs kung fu video game style to fight O-Ren Ishii in a setting ripped from another of Bruce Lee's movies (I'm pretty sure it's Chinese Connection, but it could have been Fists of Fury, at this point Tarantino has left no stone unturned)....a Japanese garden, complete with falling snow, and a fountain. The momentum shifts back and forth and the Bride and Ishii exchange blows, till the Bride finally gets the upper hand and scalps Ishii. Tarantino takes a break from raping Bruce Lee, and steals the hissing blood spray in the wind from the classic Lone Wolf and Cub also known as Shogun Assassin.

The movie ends abrubtly with Sophie (Ishii's right hand woman) being left for dead, but alive enough to give Bill the details of the battle, and pass on the threats relayed to her by the Bride. Tarantino could have save time by just cutting sequences from all of Bruce Lee's flicks, and cgi-mapping Uma's giant alien head onto his body, similiar to how the filmakers of Kung Pow: Enter the Fist did. While the action sequences in this film were cool, my biggest problem with this movie, is that none of it is Tarantino's. Kill Bill is the regurgitation of several other movies, ground up, and mixed into a new movie, with new packaging, and a new title. The second part, or continuation of Kill Bill, Volume 1, is Kill Bill, Volume 2, which was obviously the more boring half of this extended story, and watching it is like trying to take one those uncooperative shits after an all nighter of binge drinking and buffalo wing eating.

Hamlin Grade:

Timothy Dalton is the one true James Bond,
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