Kill Bill Volume 1

Reviewed by EWAN McDONALD

Herald rating: * * *

For Tarantino-istes, here's a happy coincidence, or more likely a canny piece of marketing. The DVD and video of the maverick film-maker's Kill Bill Volume 1 arrives on the shelves on the same day that Volume 2 opens on the big screens.

Coming six years after his last picture, this is a story about revenge: "Revenge is a dish best served cold," which Tarantino jokingly attributes to an "old Klingon saying".

Tarantino's muse, Uma Thurman, plays the Bride, who used to belong to a band of killers known as the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. She quit when she became the lover of the squad leader, Bill (David Carradine; given what follows, casting the 70s Kung Fu TV star was presumably another of Tarantino's little jokes).

His team, which is still functioning, is run along the lines of the Japanese warrior cults. Each member specialises in miscellaneous deadly art-forms and is known by the name of a poisonous snake (Thurman was Black Mamba).

As we are absorbing this information, our heroine arrives at a suburban house in Pasa-dena where she and another ex-squaddie, Mountain Snake (Vivica A. Fox), wreck the joint before a fatal moment witnessed by Mountain Snake's 4-year-old daughter.

It turns out that four years before, Black Mamba/the Bride had been pregnant and about to marry in Texas when she was caught up in a massacre set up by Bill. She was the only survivor and has spent the missing four years in a coma. When she came to, she found a male nurse had been hiring her unconscious self to passing locals for $75 a time and she's bent on revenge, with a list of potential victims to tick off.

And it will not stop here. After settling her accounts in America the Bride travels to Japan to persuade a legendary sword-maker, Hattori Hanzo ("special guest star" Sonny Chiba), to make her a special weapon. She will use this to take out Cottonmouth/O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu), who has set up her own shop, running Tokyo's Yakuza gangs (an excuse for Tarantino to deviate into a Japanese anime film, a pretext to trace Cottonmouth's story).

The showdown takes place in the House of Blue Leaves, a nightclub with a glass floor, which allows Tarantino to play out his violent, bloody fantasies as the Bride, in yellow, takes on scores of masked yakuza, known as the Crazy 88 Fighters, which may not have anything at all to do with the fact that there are 88 keys on a piano.

I merely offer this as a possible explanation because they wear black suits, white shirts and black ties. It's always nice when a nightclub has a dress code.

This movie is stylistically clever, it is bloody, and it has an audience among those who believe that Tarantino is the greatest artist of his generation.

Video and soundtrack are competent but not spectacular, and the main bonus is a 20-min Making Of ... feature with commentary from Tarantino and the stars. The 5, 6, 7, 8s, the Japanese joke-rock group that returns to Auckland on Monday, performs its renditions of surfin' songs and there are a few trailers for other Tarantino flicks. You can hear the movie in English and French or read Spanish, Japanese, Korean and Chinese subtitles.

R18 (restricted to 18 years and over)

DVD, video rental April 28