Slash-Fest. Sequel

Last updated: 06/10/2006 - 16:58

The second in the two-part Kill Bill series is a predictably gory - though more restrained - sequel to the series' first controversial instalment.

Kill Bill: Vol. 2

The second film in the two-part Kill Bill series from Quentin Tarantino, the sequel to last year's sword and slash-fest. Kill Bill: Vol. 1.

The Bride (played once again by Uma Thurman) continues her bloody trail of vengeance where she left off in the first film. The list of those she was to eliminate started at five - now it's down to three. After successfully killing Oren-Ishii and Vernita Green, the Bride continues in her journey of retribution to kill the remaining three: Budd, Elle Driver, and finally, her arch-nemesis, Bill.

The plot is confused after The Bride's recent discovery that her daughter - B.B. - is still alive, whereupon the formerly single-minded protagonist chooses to kill for love, rather than for revenge.

Complications arise however when The Bride is herself captured - and buried alive, by someone whom she meant to kill first...

Tarantino – A Little History

Born in 1963 in Knoxville, Tennessee, Tarantino was named, fittingly enough, after a character on a TV show, the half-breed blacksmith Quint played by Burt Reynolds on Gunsmoke. When he was two, the future filmmaker's single mom moved with him to the South Bay area south of Los Angeles, which was his home for the next two decades.

His neighbourhood in the city of Torrance was a mixture of black and white, and he was exposed to a wide range of film and pop culture influences. Martial arts movies, for example, continued to play in black neighbourhoods for several after the kung fu fad ended elsewhere; Tarantino was able to cross the tracks to continue watching them until well into the 1970s.

Film School

Tarantino quit school at 17 to take acting classes and support himself with odd jobs. At 22 he found a second home of sorts at Video Archives in Manhattan Beach, where his voluminous knowledge of old movies finally began to come in handy. With co-workers Roger Avery and Jerry Martinez, Tarantino turned Video Archives into an impromptu film school. He began writing as a way to supply practice scenes for his acting classes.

After labouring for time with Avery and some other friends on an abortive shoe string feature, My Best Friends Wedding, a raunchy buddy film on the scale of Kevin Smith's fabulous monochrome slacker comedy Clerks, Tarantino spent several frustrating years writing and trying to set up two scripts, each intended to be his directorial debut.

Partly out of frustration at the difficulty of setting up a real movie with an unknown writer attached to direct, Tarantino wrote Reservoir Dogs - leaning heavily for influence on the Hong Kong 'heroic bloodshed' genre - particularly reminiscent of the Sonny Chiba Japanese movie The Triple Cross - in 1991.

Reservoir Dogs

Reservoir Dogs was intentionally written to be the most minimal project imaginable: a story of a heist in which the robbery occurred off screen, pages and pages of dialog requiring only a single set. It was intended to be a super-cheap 16 mm with Tarantino and his Video Archives buddies playing all the parts.

Luckily, an aspiring producer Lawrence Bender read and loved the script. He begged Tarantino to give him a month to try to set it up as one of those real movies.

It was Bender who got the script to actor Harvey Keitel, and it was Keitel's enthusiasm that attracted several other good actors and eventually a decent production budget. Reservoir Dogs was a phenomenal success, first at the Sundance Film Festival and then with the world at large.

Suddenly Tarantino was hot, and both of the scripts he had been working on before Dog quickly sold: they became True Romance (1992, directed by Tony Scott) and Natural Born Killers (1993, heavily re-written, re-imagined and directed by Oliver Stone).

John Travolta

1994's Pulp Fiction was a multi-layered, time-bending, crime fiction collage that wove the stories of several characters together with world-class narrative gusto. A 3-D chess game of a movie, Pulp single-handedly restored the career of '70s icon John Travolta to its proper eminence, cemented the movie-star status of actor Samuel L. Jackson, and launched Tarantino's working relationship with the performer he has since described as ‘my actress’, Uma Thurman.

After a three-year lay-off, Tarantino wrote and directed Jackie Brown, in 1997, a crime caper based on Elmore Leonard's novel Rum Punch. Former 70's Blaxploitation film star Pam Grier garnered both 'Golden Globe' and 'Screen Actors' Guild Award' nominations for her performance in the title role, and co-star Robert Forster who was nominated for an Academy Award as 'Best Supporting Actor'. Filling out the once-in-a-lifetime cast were Samuel L. Jackson (also nominated for a Golden Globe), Robert De Niro, Bridget Fonda and Michael Keaton.

Tarantino's first career goal was to become an actor, and he has continued to play roles in his own films and in the work of others. He was the thief known only as Mr. Brown in Reservoir Dogs and the jittery Jimmie Dimmick, saddled with a fresh corpse, Pulp Fiction. In the 'Man From Hollywood' section of Four Rooms he was a blow-hard movie director. He also played bandit George Clooney's psychotic, somewhat simple brother, Richard Gecko, in Robert Rodriguez's From Dusk Till Dawn, played the title role in Jack Baren's Destiny Turns on the Radio (1995) and appeared in Spike Lee's Girl 6 (1996).

With his production partner, Lawrence Bender, through their company A Band Apart Productions, Tarantino served as executive produced October Film's French bank-heist picture Killing Zoe, directed by Roger Avary. He presented the 2001 domestic release of Master Yuen Wo Ping's 1993 martial arts classic Iron Monkey and served as executive producer of Reb Braddock's black comedy Curdled (1996) and Julia Sweeny's concert film God Said, 'HA!' (1999).

Tarantino returned in 2003 with the first instalment of Kill Bill to critical acclaim. Directed once again by Tarantino, Kill Bill: Volume 2 features a stellar cast, starring Uma Thurman (Gattaca, Mad Dog & Glory, Paycheck, Blade Runner) with: David Carradine (Kung Fu), Michael Madsen (Reservoir Dogs), Sonny Chiba (The Triple Cross, Shogun's Ninja, Sister Street Fighter), Vivica A. Fox, Daryl Hannah (Splash), Lucy Liu (Charlie's Angels and TV's Ally McBeal), LaTanya Richardson, Michael Jai White, Woo-ping Yuen and features a cameo appearance from Samuel L. Jackson (Pulp Fiction, Unbreakable).

To accompany the film - as this is a Tarantino movie - there's the usual high quality score, sourced music and hip-referencing of pop culture, not least the acrobatic combat stylings of The Matrix series, countless Hong Kong action movies from the like of John Woo, Ringo Lam and Jackie Chan.

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