In theaters

THE WHOLE TEN YARDS, directed by Howard Deutch, written by Mitchell Kapner and George Gallo, 99 minutes, rated PG-13.

It’s still early in the movie season and surely other stinkers will punch it from its low perch. Still, so far this year, worst movie honors go to Howard Deutch’s “The Whole Ten Yards,” which doesn’t go a foot before it falls into a shallow grave of its own making.

The film is a lazy, dumb, irrelevant sequel to 2000’s “The Whole Nine Yards,” which was good for what it was. It took a tired genre – the hitman comedy – and manufactured from it a funny farce. The movie took risks, the dialogue was reasonably clever and the actors seemed to be having fun, which was key.

Not so here.

As directed by Deutch from a screenplay by Mitchell Kapner and George Gallo, “The Whole Ten Yards” gathers together most of its predecessor’s cast and puts out a contract on their careers.

The story is strictly business as usual, with former hitman Jimmy “The Tulip” Tudeski (Bruce Willis) now living in Mexico with his chickens, his denial, his bunny slippers, his mullet and Jill (Amanda Peet), who has become an emotionally unbalanced hitwoman unable to score a direct hit.

One of the gags is that Jimmy has become a house husband, the Martha Stewart of the Mafia set. Another gag is that in spite of shooting so much weaponry in his youth, he can’t seem to get Jill pregnant because he himself is shooting blanks. Isn’t that hilarious? That’s the film at its best, folks.

Also unfunny is Matthew Perry’s overbearing pratfalls as Oz, the Montreal dentist who gets mixed up again with Jimmy and Jill after a Hungarian gangster named Lazlo Gogolak (Kevin Pollack) kidnaps Oz’s wife, Cynthia (Natasha Henstridge), so he can get to Jimmy through Oz.

That sounds like a setup for a relatively straightforward plot, but the execution is so frenzied and muddled – and so sloppily edited – that Perry’s character speaks volumes when he starts exclaiming about how confused he is by how everything turns out. Trust me on this – we feel his pain.

Movies like “The Whole Ten Yards” are product for the sake of product – Hollywood at its worst. They’re so excruciatingly unstimulating and banal, so cynical in their unflattering view of what audiences will accept as entertainment that you sit there not only amazed that people are getting paid millions to put this junk onto the screen, but also regretting that you got suckered by their punch.

Grade: F

On video and DVD

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

In “Kill Bill, Vol. 1,” Quentin Tarantino 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 will be released this Friday in theaters, finds the director on a tear, quite literally, chopping off more heads and severing more limbs than a slaughterhouse.

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.

Armed with his encyclopedic knowledge of pop culture and a terrifically cast 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, the gist of what unfolds goes like this: Four years pass, the Bride awakens from her coma and makes a list of the people who must die for doing her and her dead baby wrong.

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 a fantastic postfeminist display of showmanship from a director actively encouraging style over substance.

When one gives in to such an impulse, there’s always a risk the movie will suffer an emotional death, but “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. The result is pure pop art.

Grade: A