Kill Bill: Vol 1 (2003) IMDB Top 250 Guest Review

For today’s IMDB Top 250 guest review, we have the wonderful Abbi of Where The Wild Things Are. Abbi has a fabulous site filled with everything from movie reviews to fashion to top ten lists to health & fitness to cooking. Cooking! I always feel totally inferior whenever I look at her site because the closest I come to cooking is popping crumpets in the toaster and the closest I come to exercising is walking to the nearest bus stop. And her outfits are great! I have no style. And she’s funny & her Film Friday movie reviews always crack me up. Basically, she’s cooler than me in every way so you really need to check out her site if you haven’t already. 🙂

There are still some movies up for grabs if anyone wants to do a guest IMDB Top 250 review. You can find the list HERE.

Now over to Abbi for her thoughts on the kick-ass Quentin Tarantino film Kill Bill: Vol 1, IMDB rank 152 out of 250…

Kill Bill vol 1

In this first instalment Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill films a young, pregnant bride (Uma Thurman) is viciously attacked on her wedding day by her former associates and left for dead. Five years later she wakes suddenly from a coma and embarks on an unstoppable revenge mission intent not only to avenge the five years she has lost but also the life of her unborn child. Her plan is to pick off the former members of the Viper Squad, O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah) and Budd (Michael Madsen), finishing eventually with Bill (David Carradine).
And really that is pretty much the sum of the entire plot of Kill Bill, so what is it that makes sounds like a pretty run of the mill revenge movie that exciting?
First has got to be the casting of The Bride (who happens to be one of my favourite movie characters of all time). Uma Thurman is able not only to carry off her unmeasured fury but also the vulnerability caused by her confused and damaged emotional state. As a former assassin The Bride is a vicious and ruthless killer, and obviously a total badass, but she also feels pain, loss and fear, which makes her someone that it’s easy to identify and even sympathise with.
Second is the fact that Tarantino is not afraid to borrow from every and any genre he likes the look of all in one glorious hotch potch. From Western, to traditional Kung-Fu, to anime to multiple other things that I probably didn’t even register, he throws everything in everything but the kitchen sink. It shouldn’t work, and in the hands of a less skilled director it probably wouldn’t but somehow the genre switches work as a way of creating episodes within this already truncated part of a whole, which means the story at hand never gets tired. It also highlights the constant juxtapositions that crop up throughout the film. One of The Bride’s most noteworthy opponents is Gogo (Chiaki Kuriyama) a seventeen year old Japanese schoolgirl, who giggles behind her hand but is also lethal with a mace. And one of the most violent kills happens in a beautiful Japanese garden where the colour of the blood spilled is that much more vibrant spilled across the snow.
Third is the cinematography. Kill Bill vol 1 is a riot of colour interspersed with black and white that changes the perspective and emotions from one scene to the next and often within scenes. In so doing Tarantino creates intense and memorable visual portraits, the most iconic being The Bride in her yellow jumpsuit. This is mixed with creative, razor sharp fight choreography and oceans and oceans of cartoonish blood that remind us that this story is set in a hyper reality that we can only enter as bystanders.
Finally both the soundtrack and the use of sound in Kill Bill vol 1 are used mindfully to accompany and intensify the visual attack taking place onscreen, with the soundtrack always matching the genre that is currently at play.
The overall effect is that the viewer is left desperate for more after the cliff hanger ending.
5/5

Competition for the Primark Christmas sale had become particularly fierce.