‘Kill Bill’ spills blood in style of many genres

In theaters

KILL BILL, Vol. 1, written and directed by Quentin Tarantino, 93 minutes, rated R.

The new Quentin Tarantino movie, “Kill Bill, Vol. 1,” wants to put the shock back into the moviegoing experience – no matter what – and it does so without reservation, hesitation, fear or apologies.

Working from his own script, the director, who hasn’t released a movie since 1997’s “Jackie Brown,” comes out swinging with the sort of restless, overcharged ferocity that, when properly channeled, tends to send you back in your seat – way back in your seat – straight to its springs.

This kinetic, outrageous movie, the second half of which won’t be released until Feb. 20, 2004, finds the director on a tear, quite literally, chopping off more heads and assorted other body parts, slitting more throats and spilling more blood than the most efficiently brutal of slaughter houses.

Is there a point to the violence? Absolutely. “Kill Bill” is a celebration of ’70s grindhouse cinema. It was made in tribute to the director’s favorite genres – blaxploitation, the spaghetti western, Japanese anime and Yazuka, and the sort of Chinese martial arts films that Jackie Chan made in his youth.

With violence at the core of all these genres, rivers of blood were a given in Tarantino’s contemporary encore.

The movie won’t appeal to everyone, but why should it? Those who can’t stomach gore would do best to stay away. However, those who are on the same page as Tarantino – and you know who you are – will likely dig this picture. Big time.

Armed with his encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture, the amazing Robert Richardson as his cinematographer, Yuen Wo-Ping and Sonny Chiba as his martial arts choreographers, and Uma Thurman as his leading lady, Tarantino begins his movie with an unflinching, black-and-white close-up of Thurman’s smashed-in face.

Her character, Black Mamba, also known as the Bride, is lying on her back on the floor of a blood-splattered chapel in the middle of a southwestern nowhere. She’s decked out in a ruined wedding dress, she’s about eight months pregnant, and she’s surrounded by a heap of dead bodies, all of whom – including the unidentified groom – fell victim to the massacre that just took place around her.

Leaning over her is Bill (David Carradine, though we never see his face), a mysterious bloke who puts a bullet through the Bride’s head the moment she finds the courage (or is it the rage?) to tell him that the baby she’s carrying is his.

What spins from this ugliness is hardly linear – Tarantino fragments time, dicing it as if by Ginsu knife. Still, without giving too much away, the gist of what unfolds goes like this: Four years pass, the Bride awakens from her coma in the most sexually inhospitable of hospitals, and, noting the metal plate in her head and the fact that her child likely didn’t survive the attack, she makes a list of those people who must die for doing her wrong.

All of them belong to Bill’s Deadly Viper Assassination Squad, whatever that is (we never really find out, though we do learn that the Bride was a member whose fatal flaw was wanting out), and now they’re scattered in different pockets of the world.

There’s Vernita Green, codename Copperhead (Vivica A. Fox), who lives in Pasadena with her young daughter, and who knows how to handle a knife almost as well as she does a box of Kaboom cereal. There’s Elle Driver, codename California Mountain Snake (Daryl Hannah), a blond babe with one eye who likes to play nurse though she isn’t one. And there’s O-Ren Ishii, codename Cottonmouth (Lucy Liu), who resides in Tokyo and has control over a large gang of whirling thugs.

Cottonmouth, a real pill who gets her own anime sequence, has a way of dealing with sexism in corporate boardrooms that rivals the pivotal scene in “Mommie Dearest,” when Joan Crawford took on the board of Pepsi and won. In Tarantino’s homage, Cottonmouth uses more than just a pointed word to grab the group’s attention – but, my, how she goes about winning their attention.

Now an avenging angel with revenge eating at her heart, the Bride seeks out all of these evildoers, with Tarantino dividing the ensuing confrontations into chapters, each of which employs a different style of genre fighting.

What ensues is fantastic, a ripping, post-feminist display of showmanship from a director actively encouraging style over substance.

When a director gives in to such an impulse, there’s always the risk that the movie will suffer an emotional death. “Kill Bill” doesn’t. Taking a cue from silent films, Tarantino leans hard on his cast, particularly Thurman, to rough out the emotional corners of his story by focusing on their physical response to their internal conflict. He does so through tight close-ups of Thurman’s face, especially her eyes, which are just troubled, haunted and hardened enough to give this film the weight it needs to maintain our interest through the next four months.

Grade: A

Christopher Smith is the Bangor Daily News film critic. His reviews appear Mondays and Fridays in Style, Thursdays at 5:30 p.m. on WLBZ 2 and WCSH 6, and are archived on RottenTomatoes.com. He can be reached at BDNFilm1@aol.com.