Violent but good

Rating: 10/10 (4 July 2007)

Volume 1 The Bride (Thurman) is introduced to the audience in a blood-spattered wedding gown immediately after a violent showdown at a Texas wedding chapel. She attempts to tell her would-be killer, Bill (Carradine), that she is pregnant with his baby, but he shoots her in the side of the head.
Four years later, The Bride arrives at the house of Deadly Viper Vernita Green (Fox), codenamed Copperhead. Vernita and The Bride engage in a brutal fight, with The Bride eventually killing Green in front of her four-year-old daughter Nikki. She tells the girl that she's sorry for killing her mom in front of her, and that if the young girl wishes to avenge her death when she grows up, The Bride will be waiting. The Bride then leaves in a yellow pick-up truck.
A flashback to the events after the wedding reveals that the comatose Bride is the only survivor of the massacre. Elle Driver, a.k.a. California Mountain Snake, the one-eyed assassin who has replaced the Bride as Bill's lover, slips into the hospital ward intending to inject poison into The Bride's intravenous line. She is stopped at the last second by Bill, who believes The Bride deserves a more honourable death.
The Bride wakes up from her coma in the present and escapes from the hospital after killing an orderly named Buck, who has been selling sexual access to her body as she lay unconscious. She steals Buck's truck, the Pussy Wagon, and hides in the back seat as she slowly works her limbs out of atrophy. In the back of the truck, The Bride narrates the story of another Deadly Viper, O-Ren Ishii (Liu), codename: Cottonmouth. The events are shown in anime form. O-Ren rose to the top of the Japanese crime world as well as working as a highly paid assassin. The segment introduces her personal bodyguard Go-Go Yubari, her friend and lawyer Sofie Fatale (another protégé of Bill), and Johnny-Mo, leader of O-Ren's personal army, the Crazy 88.
The Bride travels to Okinawa to get a katana from Hattori Hanzō (Chiba), a renowned sword-smith, who has retired. Though Hanzo has taken an oath to never make another sword, The Bride is able to convince him of the merit of her mission, and he forges for her the best sword he has ever created.
The Bride tracks O-Ren to a hangout called the "House of Blue Leaves", where a band (The 5,6,7,8's) is performing. The Bride arrives wearing a yellow motorcycle jump suit (an homage to Bruce Lee movies), taking Fatale hostage to lure O-Ren from her dinner. O-Ren dispatches Yubari and dozens of the Crazy 88 to deal with The Bride, who proceeds to wage war on her henchmen. The Bride then turns her attention to O-Ren, climaxing in a dramatic sword fight in a snowy garden (which borrows heavily from the Japanese sexploitation film Sex & Fury).
The film ends with the revelation by Bill that The Bride's daughter is still alive, though this is not revealed to her.