Kill Bill - Vol. 1

Action, Crime, Thriller

Uma Thurman	The Bride (Black Mamba)
Lucy Liu	O-Ren Ishii (Cottonmouth)
Vivica A. Fox	Vernita Green (Copperhead)
Daryl Hannah	Elle Driver (California Mountain Snake)
Julie Dreyfus	Sofie Fatale
David Carradine	Bill
Michael Madsen	Budd (Sidewinder)
Chiaki Kuriyama	Gogo Yubari
Sonny Chiba	Hattori Hanzo
Chia Hui Liu	Johnny Mo (as Gordon Liu)
Michael Jai White	Alburt

Director	Quentin Tarantino
Producer	Lawrence Bender
Writer	Quentin Tarantino; Uma Thurman

Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol. 1 is trash for connoisseurs. From his opening gambit (including a "Shaw-Scope" logo and gaudy '70s-vintage "Our Feature Presentation" title card) to his cliffhanger finale (a teasing lead-in to 2004's Vol. 2), Tarantino pays loving tribute to grindhouse cinema, specifically the Hong Kong action flicks and spaghetti Westerns that fill his fervent brain--and this frequently breathtaking movie--with enough cinematic references and cleverly pilfered soundtrack cues to send cinephiles running for their reference books. Everything old is new again in Tarantino's humor-laced vision: he steals from the best while injecting his own oft-copied, never-duplicated style into what is, quite simply, a revenge flick, beginning with the near-murder of the Bride (Uma Thurman), pregnant on her wedding day and left for dead by the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (or DiVAS)--including Lucy Liu and the unseen David Carradine (as Bill)--who become targets for the Bride's lethal vengeance. Culminating in an ultraviolent, ultra-stylized tour-de-force showdown, Tarantino's fourth film is either brilliantly (and brutally) innovative or one of the most blatant acts of plagiarism ever conceived. Either way, it's hyperkinetic eye-candy from a passionate film-lover who clearly knows what he's doing. --Jeff Shannon