Director Quentin Tarantino is not afraid to use massive amounts blood to give the audience a unique experience in Kill Bill Volume 1.
Tarantino combines over exaggerated spouting blood with unique cinematography scenes to make Kill Bill Volume 1 a once-in-a-life time experience.

With stand-out performances by Uma Thurman as Black Mamba, and Chiaki Kuriyama as Go Go Yubari, the crazed school girl and body guard of O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu) often seen wielding the giant mace, Kill Bill makes the audience feel the emotions of the characters and care about their outcomes.

Although the acting was well done, this movie was carried by its cinematography. In Tarantino’s past film Jackie Brown, he focused on developing the characters and having them carry the movie instead of using cinematography. This time around Tarantino has done the opposite. He uses different types of techniques, such as animation and black and white to add a new level to the film. These unique techniques alone cause the audience to stick with the film just to see what other methods Tarantino will throw into the movie.

The story, broken up into chapters, follows Black Mamba as she reeks revenge on a group of assassins that attempted to murder her at her wedding and her former boss, Bill. Volume 1 begins somewhere in the middle of the first part where Mamba is facing off against Vernita Green (Vivica A. Fox), one of the assassins that attempted to murder her. Five minutes into the film Mamba and Green head off into an extremely intense chick-fight that demolishes an entire house. After the fight Mamba pulls out a list of people that she intends to kill to show the audience who she has killed so far, and who is left.

The story then jumps back approximately sixth months into the past to show what happened to Mamba and how she recovered from an intense shootout in a small chapel. After this is explained, the story continues to the main scene where Mamba faces off against O-Ren Ishii and her clan of sword-wielding Tokyo gangsters.

But before this takes place Mamba goes into an explanation of Ishii and her childhood. Because of the immense gore in the following scene Tarantino uses a technique to turn it into one of the most memorable scenes in cinema history, animation. It is at this moment when the movie shifts to the beautifully drawn anime that the audience realizes this is a movie to remember. The anime allows the audience to see the immense pain the characters felt as they were fighting. The faces would become distorted and the skin would sort of come off of their faces to magnify the effect it has on the audience.

The next fight scene involves Black Mamba and her newly crafted samurai sword facing off against 80 Tokyo gangsters and one extremely crazed schoolgirl. Because of the grand battle that follows and the many severed limbs, Tarantino uses another camera change to marvel the audience. The fight sequence is changed into black and white. This color shift changes the mood of the battle and also allows the audience to enjoy a magnificently choreographed fight scene.

As the movie comes to an end somewhere shortly after where it began a startling discovery is revealed to the audience that opens it up for a sensational sequel.

Although Kill Bill had many cinematic breakthroughs they are cut short by the overuse of blood that consistently geysers out of peoples severed limbs. The first few times blood spurts out of peoples cuts it is amusing at how unrealistic it is, but at about the two-thirds mark of the movie it becomes gross and sickening.

Truly hardcore kung-fu fans will take more pleasures in this film than the average viewer will because Tarantino threw in a few things from past Bruce Lee movies. For one, the climactic battle that involves Mamba facing off against 80 masked suited men with swords has Uma Thurman sporting a very slick yellow spandex suit taken straight out of Enter the Dragon. The whole fight is actually taken from Enter the Dragon where masked men come into the room from every direction ready to take on Bruce Lee.

If you are a person that can deal with a tremendous amount of blood spurring out of people’s bodies than you will enjoy Kill Bill to its fullest. If not, I would recommend seeing it anyway for its magnificent cinematography, choreography, and acting.

Running time 1hr 50mins.