After making a name for himself with a string of three masterfully crafted crime movies, Quentin Tarantino made his first foray into genre cinema with his fourth movie, Kill Bill, a martial arts actioner that ballooned to such an epic scale that it spilled over into his fifth movie, too, although he considers Kill Bill’s two volumes to be one entry on his filmography.
Mixing in tropes from such disparate genres as spaghetti westerns, samurai movies, and blaxploitation films, Tarantino’s revenge-based story for Kill Bill takes some wildly unexpected turns. There are also some shocking death scenes, with this being a tale of heroic bloodshed and all.
Plot Turn: O-Ren’s Anime Backstory
After the opening scenes of Kill Bill: Volume 1 establish the Bride and her quest for revenge, it suddenly takes a major detour to explore the backstory of her next target, O-Ren Ishii.
O-Ren witnessed her parents’ murder while she was hiding under their bed, and then dedicated her life to tracking down the crime lord responsible and brutally killing him. The whole backstory is animated beautifully in an anime style.
Death Scene: Buck
When the Bride awakens from her coma at the beginning of Kill Bill, she’s being molested by a trucker who paid off Buck, the orderly, for some time alone with her. She bites off his lip and kills him, then Buck returns to the blood-soaked room, surprised.
The Bride has vague memories of Buck sexually assaulting her while she was in a coma, and exacts swift vengeance by slicing the back of his ankle and repeatedly slamming the door against his head.
Plot Turn: The Bride’s Daughter Is Alive
One of the fun things that splitting Kill Bill into two movies allowed Tarantino to do is end the first part on a tantalizing cliffhanger to get viewers excited for the second part.
The writer-director ended Kill Bill: Volume 1 on one doozy of a cliffhanger, as an off-screen Bill reveals that the Bride’s daughter is still alive.
Death Scene: Crazy 88
Arguably the greatest action sequence in the Kill Bill saga is the battle at the House of Blue Leaves. On her way to face O-Ren, the Bride has to fend off the full force of the Crazy 88, her army of sword-wielding goons in black suits.
With sharp cinematography, gallons of fake blood, and a mixture of color and black-and-white, Tarantino created one of the bloodiest, most frenzied fight scenes ever put on film.
Plot Turn: The Bride Is Buried Alive
When the Bride approaches Budd’s trailer, her plan is to catch him out with a surprise attack. But he’s more alert than she suspects. She swings the door open and he’s waiting on the other side with a loaded shotgun. He shoots her in the stomach, then gets a friend to help him bury her alive.
Tarantino really puts the Bride through the wringer throughout this movie, but getting buried alive is arguably the most terrible of the many terrible things that happen to her.
Death Scene: Budd
When Elle Driver arrives at Budd’s trailer to buy the Bride’s Hattori Hanzō sword for $1 million, Budd naively takes the briefcase of cash she hands him and pops it open.
Much to his surprise, there’s a deadly snake hidden among the wads of cash that suddenly jumps out and bites him on the forehead. It bites him a few more times and, within moments, he’s dead. While the Bride doesn’t get to kill him directly, it is fitting that he’s killed by a black mamba, the namesake of her codename.
Plot Turn: Elle Driver Loses Another Eye
All of the Bride’s enemies end up dead by the end of Kill Bill — except Elle Driver. While it can be assumed that she was bitten by the same black mamba she brought to kill Budd, all we see on-screen is her eye-gouging.
As Ennio Morricone’s “A Silhouette of Doom” sets up a climactic fight scene, the Bride simply rips out Elle’s only remaining eye, blinding her. If Kill Bill: Volume 3 ever gets made, Nikki Bell could be trained by a blind Elle Driver.
Death Scene: O-Ren Ishii
After the chaotic bloodshed of the House of Blue Leaves massacre, the Bride confronts O-Ren in a snowy garden for a sleeker, more sophisticated final duel. Kill Bill was inspired by Lady Snowblood in a lot of ways, but the influence is particularly prevalent in this scene.
The moment that the Bride slices off the top of O-Ren’s head is one of the most beautifully haunting portrayals of violence in the Tarantino oeuvre. It certainly leaves a lasting impression.
Plot Turn: The Final Showdown With Bill Is Surprisingly Civil
After the Bride had to fight an army of henchmen to get to O-Ren and escape from a shallow grave to get to Budd, Kill Bill viewers were expecting the mother of all action-packed finales when she arrived to “kill Bill.”
But then, Tarantino subverts those expectations with a surprisingly civil showdown. After learning that Bill has been raising their daughter B.B., the Bride has a long verbal confrontation with Bill before silently killing him in the night.
Death Scene: Bill
In a movie called Kill Bill, it was always assumed that the Bride would kill Bill at the end, so Tarantino went one step further to give Bill’s death scene some shock factor.
After Pai Mei’s Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique is introduced in the training flashback, the Bride puts it into practice in the movie’s finale. Surprised that Pai Mei taught her the technique, Bill solemnly stands, takes five paces, and dies.