Yeah, I like it. This is my review: it may be bizarre but it’s artistic in its own way.
The plot is very basic: she wanted to leave her old life as a killer but Bill didn’t agree, sent the other 4 members of her old squad to kill her, Bill shot her too, but after 4 years in a coma she woke up and remembered, and started a path of revenge. The making however is not that basic: there’s an animated segment to tell the story of the Japanese girl, there’s Morricone music, there’s blood flowing everywhere but in a sort of anime way, where blood does not drop out of a cut arm, it is sprayed outwards with force. The story is not told in a linear way but there’s no chance of losing the plot, because there are big chapter titles explaining what we’re going to see. It’s a colourful movie with black&white segments. The protagonist’s name is bleeped out of all this first film. It can make you puff in annoyance at how over the top it is, but it still keeps you watching.
I didn’t know that “revenge is a dish best served cold” was an old Klingon proverb :lol: one shouldn’t believe everything that Khan says :lol:
Plot and details of the movie:
There was a mass+cre at a small chapel. It was a wedding rehearsal but they were all in their wedding attires, so she’s called the Bride because she was wearing a wedding dress. She was pregnant at the time. Everyone died: her man, their friends, the reverend and his mother, the pianist, everyone. Bill shot her in the head to make sure… and yet she didn’t die.
You can understand right away what kind of sick f*ck Bill is because while she’s on the ground covered in blood he tells her that he’s not sadistic, he’s masochistic, right before he shoots her.
She was part of Bill’s Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, and Bill was the father of her baby girl.
The first chapter (“2”) shows us her fight with the second one on her list, Vernita aka Copperhead. She had a beautiful little house in Pasadena, green walls, shiny grass, child toys all around, it’s so pretty. And as soon as she opens the door, they start fighting and wrecking the house, but they stop when her 4-year-old daughter Nikki comes back home on the school bus.
When our Bride introduces herself, there’s a bleep over her name, that will remain a mystery for this first film.
The child is sent to her room because mommy and ‘her friend’ have some ‘talking’ to do. They do talk a little bit over a coffee: in Vernita’s new life her new name is jeanne, married to Lawrence Bell.
They agree not to do it in front of the child, and to meet somewhere outside and have at it undisturbed, but then, while she’s fixing Nikki’s cereals, Vernita takes her chance to shoot her, and gets killed with a knife to the heart. Vernita was also quite pissed that she didn’t get to be black mamba, and for being a mother with a new, changed life, she sure swears a lot, maybe more than anyone else in both films.
The child appears in the kitchen, so She tells her: “it was not my intention to do this in front of you, for that, I’m sorry”, she adds that “your mother had it coming” and that “when you grow up, if you still feel raw about it, I’ll be waiting”.
<<for those regarded as warriors, when engaged in combat the vanquishing of thine enemy can be the warrior’s only concern. Suppress all human emotion and compassion, kill whoever stands in thy way, even if that be if that be LordGod or Buddha himself. This truth lies at the heart of the art of combat.>>
She drives away in a yellow truck with pussy wagon written colorfully on it, and we’ll soon see how she got it.
Chapter 2 is titled “The blood-splattered BRIDE” and explains what happened “four years and six months earlier in the city of El Paso, Texas” and shows us more about her. After the mass*cre, the cops came, and the sheriff kept talking with his cop son for a while about what happened before he finally noticed that she wasn’t actually dead. Her ‘new’ name was Arlene Machiavelli. Elle tried to finish her off at the hospital while she was in a coma, appearing in a nurse outfit complete with red cross on her eye-patch, when Bill called her telling her to “abort the mission” because She deserves better. Four years later, she wakes up suddenly, like from a nightmare, remembering Bill’s last words before he shot her in the head, and of course finding that she has no pregnant belly anymore. She screams and sobs, but her mind is working already and she can tell that it’s been 4 years, she clearly says so while looking at her hands. I mean, “four years” is quite specific of her, but she’s not a normal girl, we’ll see she’s done lots of hard trainings, and so this is a way of showing us how out-of-the-ordinary she is. Well, she already saw the state of her belly, she touched the metal in her head, now covered in her blond hair, and she looked at her hands closely, so it’s not so impossible. Quite specific, but not impossible. I’d say because of the hair more than the skin, but whatever.
She pretends to be still asleep when people come in: it’s the nurse (oss) Buck who is letting men f*ck her in exchange of money. I’m glad to say that she rips the trucker’s lip off with her teeth -I’m pretty sure it’s the lip and not the tongue. We don’t see the ripping itself, but she’s covered in blood so it mush have been ripping. Her legs don’t work so she crawls on the floor. When Buck comes back in 20 minutes, the trucker in on the floor, not moving and covered in blood, the bed is empty and she sticks a knife into his leg and bangs the door on his head a bit to know where Bill is, which of course he doesn’t know, and then she remembers hearing his words when she was first brought in - which horrifyingly makes one believe that what the trucker tried to do to her happened many many times already, and by Buck first of all. I’m not sure here if she kills him, but I think so, maybe she slammed the door on his head with all her strength… and her arms did have strength. I hope she did.
She takes his car keys and his uniform, then she gets out in a wheelchair. She gets to the hospital car park and has no trouble at all finding his vehicle, because in a sea of black cars he’s got a yellow truck with pussy wagon written in pink in the back. She lifts herself inside the car and then she spends some hours regaining strength in her legs, starting from one toe and going on. It takes her 13 hours, at which point she can walk and drive.
Her first target is O-Ren Ishii, “the easiest to find”, because she had become “queen of the Tokyo underworld”.
The third chapter (“the origin of O-Ren”) is all about her. She was half Chinese half Japanese, born “on an American military base in Tokyo”. When she was 9 she witnessed the murder of both her parents.
Her story now is showed as an animated sequence, but this is no shojo manga I assure you. The drawings are crude, nothing delicate in their faces, very mature indeed. From under the bed, little O-ren saw yakuza boss Matsumoto and his men slash her parents to death, and her home was set on fire. Her narrating voice tells us that “she swore revenge. Luckily for her, boss Matsumoto was a p*d*phile” which means that she could get close to him easily, and then she killed him, at 11 years old. “By 20, she was one of the top female assassins in the world”. “At 25, she did her part in the killing of nine innocent people, including my unborn daughter, in a small wedding chapel in el Paso, Texas”.
As soon as she’s back on her feet, She flies to Okinawa.
Indeed Chapter four is “The man from Okinawa”. She goes to Hattori Hanzo who she’s never met before because she needs “Japanese steel”, because she’s got “vermin to kill”. It’s reverential the way she looks at the swords he has along the walls, but he’s not selling those. Well, she’s not there to buy, she wants him to give him one, because “my vermin is a former student of yours”.
He “swore an oath to God, 28 years ago” to never make another one, to never again create “something that kills people”, because it’s Bill, he feels an obligation this time, and lets her sleep there while he makes her a new one. A month later, his “finest sword” is done, and it’s hers.
Chapter five is her fight with O-ren Ishii (“Showdown at House of Blue Leaves”). Her “powerful posse” is called the “crazy 88”; her lieutenant, lawyer and best friend is Sofie Fatale, half French half Japanese, who for some reason was present at the chapel. Gogo Yubari is O-ren’s personal bodyguard, a 17-year-old girl wearing a school uniform, and “what she lacks in age, she makes up for in madness”; Johnny Mo is the general of the crazy 88. When O-ren “assumed power over the crime council” only one man objected, Boss Tanaka was disgusted by her, he speaks of “the perversion done to this council which I love more than my own children by making a Chinese Jap-American half breed b*tch its leader!”
She walks quickly on the table and with a swish his head is off in a moment. All the men gasp, Gogo and Sofie smile.
The Bride now flies to Tokyo, and she keeps her sword with her on the plane… she rides a yellow/black bike that goes perfectly well with her yellow-black jumpsuit, the same as Bruce Lee’s yellow tracksuit.
The girls band playing punk rock and roll music is quite cool, I like them. It’s the 5.6.7.8’s, and they were really cool, barefoot and wild, and good music.
In the bathroom, She takes her jumpsuit off… and underneath she’s got an identical outfit, only it’s a two pieces. She gets Sofie there, and yells for O-ren to show herself. Before She can kill her though, She has to go through all her posse. She goes swish on Sofie’s arm and leaves her bloody on the floor, then She kills the first few guys that go at her, then it’s Gogo’s turn. Gogo almost manages to strangle her with her chain, but then She gets her with nails in her head, dead on the spot. At this point, She hears motorcycles and asks: “is that what I think it is?” - “you didn’t think it was gonna be that easy, did you?” - “you know, for a second there, yeah, I kind of did” - “silly rabbit”
She has to fight a lot of them at the same time, so she’s got to take as many of them out of the fight as quick as she can, and so not everyone dies, many of them only get something c*t off - unless it’s their head, in that case they die, but it often is just an arm or a foot. Most scenes of this fight are in black and white, and there’s some sort-of-flying as is usual in martial arts, there’s Her jumping on a guy’s shoulder and standing there, She also has the balance of a cat. It’s not clear to me while this fight ends in darkness, who switches off the light? Anyway, there’s only one guy left, but he’s trembling so much that She only breaks his sword into pieces, spanks him with her sword and tells him to run. He does.
She only has to kill the ‘general’ now and it’s finally O-Ren’s turn, who really hopes She might be too tired now to be at her best. They fight in the back garden, a winter garden with snow. A beautiful place. They sword fight, She gets injured in her back, O-Ren says “silly Caucasian girl likes to play with samurai swords; you may not be able to fight like a samurai but you can at least die like a samurai”, but of course She’s not done, She never gives up, on the contrary She says “attack me with everything you have” and now She injures O-Ren drawing blood. “For ridiculing you earlier, I apologize” - “Accepted”
They continue until She goes swish one last time and her head is off at her forehead, and O-Ren can still utter the words “that really was a Hattori Hanzo sword”…and it’s quite a beautiful image - a tough one in its meaning but beautiful in its visual - how O-ren in her white kimono falls to her knees and then down on her side while our Bride, exhausted, sits on a bench in the beautiful white winter garden…
The next is Sofie, she’s left alive in front of a hospital, but I guess without both arms, fort wo reasons: information and so she can tell Bill what happened and what’s coming.
We see her death list=1.O-ren,2.Vernita,3.Budd,4.Elle,5.Bill. And it’s a felt image that after she wrote Bill’s name we see her smiling at him when he showed up at her wedding (rehearsal).
The film then ends on shocking news, we hear Bill (don’t see but hear) asking Sofie: “is she aware her daughter is still alive?”
The Bride is Uma Thurman - aka black mamba
O-Ren Ishii is Lucy Liu - aka cottonmouth
Vernita Green is Vivica A. Fox - aka copperhead
Budd is Michael Madsen
Elle Driver is Daryl Hannah - aka California mountain snake
Bill is David Carradine
Gogo is Chiaki Kuriyama
Sofie is Julie Dreyfus
Hattori Hanzo is Sonny Chiba
johnny Mo is Gordon Liu
“Young 88 (spanked boy)” is Hu Xiaohui :lol:
The bride stunt double is Zoe Bell
The bride martial arts stunt double is Satya Bellord
The credits say this is the 4th film by Quentin Tarantino
ITA Kill Bill: volume 1
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