Bl**dy marvellous

Rating: Null/10 (22 October 2003)

You wait six years for a new Quentin Tarantino film and what happens? Two come along. But, on the strength of Volume 1, I'm really looking forward to the second and maybe some cinemas will show both parts together, giving a whole new meaning to the term 'double bill'. The whole project is a tongue-in-cheek homage to samurai films, kung fu movies, and spaghetti westerns that will revive Tarantino's cult reputation.
From the throat-grabbing opening to the jaw-dropping closing, along a gravity-defying, blood-spurting, limb-chopping journey of retribution, this is classic and unmistakable Tarantino, down to the use of chapter headings and labelling, the non-linear nature of the narrative, the graphic deployment of an anime sequence, and the inevitable idiosyncratic choice of music. Writer and director Tarantino was right to wait a year until his preferred star Uma Thurman was available, because this talented - as well as sexy and sassy - woman carries the film as the one-time pregnant bride who becomes a vengeful assassin in a yellow cat suit with a very special sword.
The whole thing is something to do with a strange and fearsome group called The Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. Two squad members - Vernita Green who is actually black (Vivica A Fox) and O-Ren Ishii who is actually a Chinese-American and not Japanese (Lucy Lui) - pay the price for messing up the wedding, with a veritable orgy of death and dismemberment in between, and I don't think that the other squad members (including former lover Bill) will have much of a chance in Volume 2. But I want to see how they meet their well-deserved end and hopefully in the process discover where the bride learned her martial arts, what exactly was her relationship with Bill, and why was her wedding day the subject of such savagery.