Kill Bill Vol. 1: An Exploitation Film or An Exploitation of Exploitation Films

Rating: Null/10 (24 December 2003)

Tarantino wants his audience to be so in love with technique of the film without getting the audience to react to it. It poses as a B-movie, but it isn't a b-movie. B-movie's have kinetic flair and high wire gusto. This film is simply a pile Shaw brothers references (among others). In Reservoir Dogs, when Mr. Blonde sliced the cop's ear off to pop tunes, we were affected by it. Tarantino wasn't just saying, "Look at me! Look what I can do!" He was actually showing us what he could do. This film hints at something better than it is without showing us this "something". Also: it is a cartoon. Tarantino's previous films looked at the characters with an ironically detached style making it amusing. Crime movies would always show us thugs getting their heads blown off without any imagination. With Pulp Fiction, Tarantino was curious: he wondered "How do the gangsters get rid of the corpses? Do they hire someone? What if their wife comes home and finds the corpse?" With these thoughts, Tarantino struck upon brilliance, cheerfully playing with gangster cliches. Now Tarantino is trapped in these cliches, delivering characters and scenarios of the same artistic quality of the filmmakers he was originally parodorizing.