Taglines: Will she kill Bill?
The fourth movie by Quentin Tarantino is an epic tale of one woman’s quest for justice presented in two installments. In Kill Bill— Vol. 1 the title character, played by David Carradine, is a mostly unseen sinister figure looming over the story who has organized an elite group called the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (or DiVAS). All of the vipers are code-named after poisonous serpents and the deadliest of them all is Black Mamba (Uma Thurman), who is also Bill’s former lover.
Early in Vol. 1 a Texas Ranger (Michael Parks) surveys a grisly scene: an entire wedding party slaughtered during a dress rehearsal in a rural chapel. The pregnant woman in the blood-splattered wedding dress is Black Mamba, better known as The Bride.
Bill and The Vipers left The Bride for dead, but unluckily for them she was merely comatose. The Viper assassin California Mountain Snake, a.k.a. Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), creeps into The Bride’s hospital room, disguised as a nurse and brandishing a syringe— only to be called off at the last possible moment by Bill himself.
Her first target among the wedding massacre participants is the Viper known as Cottonmouth, O-Ren Ishii (Lucy Liu). At seven O-Ren hid only inches away as her parents were killed. At age eleven she took her own bloody revenge, and has since become the first female boss-of-all-bosses of the Japanese yakuza underworld.
Read the Full Production Notes
Directed by: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Uma Thurman, David Carradine, Daryl Hannah, Michael Madsen, Sonny Chiba, Julie Dreyfus, Chiaki Kuriyama
Screenplay by: Quentin Tarantino
Production Design by: Yohei Taneda, David Wasco
Cinematography by: Robert Richardson
Film Editing by: Sally Menke
Costume Design by: Alexander AD, Kumiko Ogawa, Catherine Marie Thomas
Set Decoration by: Yoshihito Akatsuka, Sandy Reynolds-Wasco
Music by: RZA
MPAA Rating: R for strong bloody violence, language, sexual content.
Studio: Miramax Films
Release Date: October 10, 2003
