Cool Ass Cinema Presents: A Screenplay Not By Quentin Tarantino Part 3

CHAPTER 6: WHY DID IT TAKE SO LONG TO KILL BILL? OR, THE WHOLE BLOODY, BULLSHITTIN' AFFAIR

This KILL BILL section is too damn massive to be contained in a single piece so it's gonna be split into two volumes, haha! 

But seriously, the exorcism of the demonic presence that is my love/hate relationship with Quentin Tarantino movies continues with the two KILL BILL films.
  
After seeing the man in interviews and witnessing some of his bizarre behavioral patterns, I began to become more and more disenchanted with this eccentric talent. Is it just me, or does it look like Q Man's mouth is actually being sucked back into his head?

Anyway, the announcement and filming of KILL BILL got me excited and curious to see the result considering T Bone frequently gushed about his love of HK kung fu movies. I was really anxious to see this one. Taking into account his technique of utilizing the conventions of the Blaxploitation genre in JACKIE BROWN (1997) and making that style uniquely his own, it had me curious as to his treatment of Chinese martial arts pictures. 
And of course, QT's outboard motorboat mouth was loudly spinning how this was his big muthafuckin' EPIC. The news soon broke that the picture was too titanic to be a single feature and due its 4 hour running time, it would be split into two "volumes". I recall an article where one of the Weinstein's claimed this was gonna be the movie event to end all movie events. Possibly if somebody else was directing it.

So there I am sittin' in the theater and the Shaw logo comes up... big smile on my face. Movie begins and it's okay. Not bad for a revenge picture and I'm enjoying it, but something just doesn't feel right about this movie. There's so many themes, ideas and kitchen sinks being thrown at the screen at any given moment. Just some of the most random shit I've ever seen. There's no tone or stability to this thing. You expect erraticism in Hong Kong movies because they didn't have a hundred million to flush down the toilet to tell a decent story, so the more bat-shit crazy the better. KILL BILL wants to be THE POSEIDON ADVENTURE of kung fu-samurai movies... if only there were any martial arts disaster movies.

 
And Japanese Superstar, Shinichi "Sonny" Chiba is totally wasted here (more on my disdain for Chiba's usage in the next chapter). Tarantino often gushes about how huge of a fan of Chiba he is, but when he finally gets around to casting him in his movie, his big scene is a "comedic" tea house sequence which consists of arguing over hot Sake. It has all the meaningful impact you'd expect from a typical conversation in a Rob Zombie movie.

  I remember when in a couple of scenes some words were bleeped out, you could hear most everybody in the theater going "HUH?!" And when the film switched to B/W during the House of Discolored Leaves sequence, a few folks got up to harass the projectionist thinking something went wrong with the movie! The former turned out to be some bizarre inside joke (see below) that the Great and Powerful Q thought was so fuckin' Kool. He boasted about how this was supposedly some big deal to be revealed in the second film. The latter was to secure an R rating, while I thought he was echoing the B/W tinting often given to the Chinese versions of the original films to avoid censorship.

"You think they've been hiding her name, but Bill's been saying it all along. Uma came up with the name Beatrix -- she worked for somebody with that name. And I came up with Kiddo. That's what I call women -- when I really like a girl, I call her 'kiddo.'"--With audiences eagerly awaiting the shocking secret behind the "KILL BILL Bleep", Tarantino finally unveiled this monumental revelation in April of 2004!

 
Till Tarantino finally came out with the meaning of this name game, the audience would be teased/annoyed with several intrusive 'bleeps' on the soundtrack of KILL BILL 1 and a portion of VOLUME 2. Turned out to be nothing more than an inconsequential inside joke; or a reference to the Trix cereal brand (silly rabbit, Trix are for kids) by way of Uma Thurman's characters name being Beatrix Kiddo of all things.

"There's another movie, Chang Chay, who was literally like the John Ford of old school martial art films at Shaw Brothers did a film called VENGEANCE!...sort of his version of POINT BLANK...and there's a scene where this guy, uh, where the um...uh, um, uh...Tai Lung who was in THE KILLER, uh, is murdered, but the thing is, before he's murdered, he fights like a hundred guys, and they even have in a sequence in it, in the American prints, where at a certain point it gets so bloody, it goes to black and white! You know, and, uh, I was like 'wow, that's really cooool', alright! I actually saw the actual Chinese version of it, and they never go to black and white!"--QT rambling on incessantly and showing off his Untruth Fist Style, taught to him by Ric Meyers, master of martial malarkey. While Chang CHEH did direct VENGEANCE! (1970), TI Lung was not in THE KILLER (1989).

 The major problem I have with KILL BILL (aside from bizarre music choices and obligatory Tarantinoesque close ups of feet) is that Tarantino totally failed at re-establishing the kung fu film as a viable commodity in the American mainstream marketplace. Granted, those movies will never enjoy the sort of popularity they had during the 1970s. Even that early in the game and despite their popularity and curiosity factor, those films were snickered at for their off cue dubbing; which will never perfectly sync, anyways. The Chinese language is a tonal one; at the end of sentences, their mouths are often open whereas ours are not.

Tarantino had an opportunity to bring some new-found respectability to a genre that had long lingered in the minds of the mainstream as films with poverty row production values, lousy photography, bad actors, bad dubbing, bad everything. CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON was a fluke and doesn't really count since it wasn't technically a martial arts film. It was a love story that happened to have martial arts-swordplay sequences accentuating the dramatics surrounding them. But it was a huge success and pushed long standing misconceptions of Asian films out of the lime-light, albeit temporarily. 

By comparison, Sergio Leone deeply loved the American western; so much so that he took the genres conventions and created a loving tribute to it with the sprawling majesty of ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST (1968); a stunningly gorgeous movie that resembles a canvas of visuals come to life. You could watch it without sound and still understand what the film is about. But then that begs the question of why someone would do such a thing and miss out on the operatic excellence of Ella Dell'Orso's magnificent vocals; but I digress.

Tarantino didn't do this. Instead, he took aspects of those films (the dubbed imported versions, mind you. The originals are the polar opposite of what we ended up with on our own cinema and television screens) that he was fond of, threw them all in a blender and created this wily, erratic, self-absorbed concoction. Traces of Q's pop cultured, referential ego surfaced in PULP FICTION, but it ran buck fuck wild in both BILL's. Q Baby's treatment of HK's most recognized style of genre export did nothing to entice new fans, nor enamor older, casual fans into believing they were anything any different from their memories; simple entertainment for un-sophisticated tastes to only be remembered fondly for temporary lapses of nostalgia.

To be fair, I still like things about KILL BILL. Uma Thurman pushes her emotional range to the limit and creates a memorable performance in a mostly unbalanced movie. Some of the shots are extraordinary in their attention to detail. The fight choreography is exciting, although action scenes (particularly the finale) are slightly undone by bizarre musical choices. Why must there be beach music during the battle with the Crazy 88s?! The inclusion of a disco song for the sword fight between Thurman and Liu is just awkward. The song is great, it's just a jarring selection for a samurai/martial arts fight. Some find Dario Argento's fascination with heavy metal music in his horror films perplexing, but it's nowhere near as out of place as T Bone's iPod playlist here. I do like the soundtrack, it just doesn't always fit what's transpiring onscreen. No other director could get away with this kind of musical rambunctiousness. Because they're not KOOOOL, man.

  
The floodgates of arrogance and self-parody weren't opened, they were blown up with KILL BILL, reaching critical levels when that Titanic floating refuse, G****HOUSE, came out and sank mightily a few years down the road. But that, is another story. Next up, it's the even more jarring KILL BILL VOLUME 2, a 2 1/2 hour bore-fest where people do lots and lots of talking. There's more weird, intrusive musical cues, different genre styles mashed together and a climax that is less slam-bang than it is touchingly poignant; which drastically clashes with the already tonally uneven first picture. From here on out, QT's movies are the cinematic equivalent of a Gary Busey coke binge lorded over by Drew Barrymore and Robert Downey, Jr.

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART MUTHAFUCKIN' FOUR

Gore-geous Ladies of Horror: The Femme Fatales of Titillation & Exploitation

They are The Gore-geous Ladies of Horror. They are either the pursued, or the pursue-e. They are the helpless damsels in distress that need rescuing from a tall and handsome hero. They are the strong, leather clad pistol packin' mamas. They are the heroines and villainesses of horror and fantastic cinema. Ever since the 80s, genre fans just called'em Scream Queens. 

This article (a lead-in to a regular column) is a piece on some of my favorite Femme Fatales. It also includes some very important women in film who may have done other things outside the Cinema-fantastic realm, but tend to be remembered for their roles in horror or science fiction movies above all else. Some of the images seen here are scanned from old magazines and others are from google. And yes, there is nudity about.

Fay Wray did a string of horror talkies in the 1930s. She is unanimously cited as the first actress to be labeled a 'Scream Queen' even though the terminology was decades away from prominence. Since strong women roles were still a few decades away as well, the stereotypical "rescue me" archetype was the embodiment of the female form in movies at the time; which also extended to the advertising campaigns of these productions.

The late actress got the ball rolling for horrors feminine future with such oldies but goodies like the pseudo horrors of DOCTOR X and THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME (both 1932). She re-teamed with X's Lionel Atwill for a double dose of terror with MYSTERY IN THE WAX MUSEUM and THE VAMPIRE BAT (both 1933), but it was KING KONG (1933) where she really put her pipes to good use shrieking in fear from the 8th Wonder of the World.

 
Unusual for actresses that starred in these kinds of movies, Fay Wray's career wasn't stunted by her participation in them, nor was she typecast. Still, her films such as THE MOST DANGEROUS GAME and particularly KING KONG were classy affairs and have went on to a status well beyond a mere cult of followers.

Since then, there have been other actresses like Mara Corday who have appeared in various 'B' science fiction and horror pictures. Speaking of Corday, she was as curvaceous as they come and her three genre outings are among the best, and best of the worst 50s science fiction. 

Bert I. Gordon often catches a lot of hell for his macro enlarged killer kritters, but the same effects technique is utilized in Jack Arnold's TARANTULA (1955); wherein Corday is among a cast menaced by an outsized arachnid created by Leo G. Carroll. Dirty Harry Callahan had an early gig as an Air Force pilot napalming the hell out of the title hairy beast during the fiery finale.

Corday again was menaced by gigantic scorpions and other creepy crawlies in the action packed THE BLACK SCORPION and an enormous interplanetary turkey surrounded by a force field in THE GIANT CLAW (both from 1957). She abandoned the genre after this and segued into television till Dirty Harry himself, Clint Eastwood gave her roles in some of his movies.

Allison Hayes had multiple 'B' pictures on her resume, but she will forever be famously associated with but a single one of them, that being ATTACK OF THE 50 FOOT WOMAN (1958). It was one of the more unique 50s kitsch classics in its tale of an abused housewife who grows to giant size after being exposed to an equally gigantic alien from outer space. Ultimately, she goes all Godzilla on her hometown in search of her cheating husband.

It would be a cardinal sin to not include Barbara Steele on any list of the greatest, and or most memorable Scream Queens. The entrancing British actress virtually cornered the market in the 1960s via an impressive stream of European made horror pictures of the Gothic variety. With her connections via AIP (who released her star vehicle BLACK SUNDAY in America), Steele had an open line to appear in one of Roger Corman's classic interpretations of Edgar Allan Poe pictures; in this case, the film was THE PIT & THE PENDULUM from 1961.

Some of Steele's best include Mario Bava's BLACK SUNDAY (1960), CASTLE OF BLOOD (1964) and THE LONG HAIR OF DEATH (1964).

Hammer Films out of Britain not only helped reinvigorate Gothic horror, but also made women dressed in diaphanous gowns exploitation chic in countless productions. The company knew how to market their movies and peddle the flesh onscreen with the right amount of curvaceousness. Hammer's horror heroines and villainesses are too many to mention here, but among the most recognized and popular with fans (and myself) is Caroline Munro.

Munro is unique in the Hammer horror canon in that she never shed her clothes in any of her roles for the company. The closest she got was a darkly lit naked tease in the anemic CAPTAIN KRONOS, VAMPIRE HUNTER (1972). There's nothing at all wrong with seeing some bare flesh onscreen. I can't tell you how many times I wished Kate O'Mara's top would miraculously disappear at some point in HORROR OF FRANKENSTEIN (1970), but for Munro to have never stripped and yet still maintain a strong, long lasting fan base is a feat in itself. In fact, many of Hammer's girls didn't strip, but had far more meatier roles than Munro had.

Another reason I cite Munro is that she ultimately shredded the persona of the 'damsel in distress' with the heaving, sweaty, barely concealed bosom from such pictures as THE GOLDEN VOYAGE OF SINBAD (1974) and AT THE EARTH'S CORE (1976). She passed on VAMPIRELLA because of the required nudity, but embraced the lively, if hilarious chintzy STAR CRASH (1978). Here, Munro was a super heroine that kicked ass and also wore skimpy clothes (for the first half of the film, anyways) that stirred unusual feelings in little boys everywhere. She also menaced James Bond as a Bad Bond Girl in THE SPY WHO LOVED ME (1977).

Hammer Films were probably the ultimate showcase for voluptuous and bosomy actresses seeking fame on the big screen, even if it were relatively brief in many cases. Ingrid Pitt is a good example of this. In her heyday, she was only in four horror pictures within a three year period, yet she is one of the best remembered, and best loved leading ladies in all of horror cinema.

The striking Polish beauty had a seductively alluring voice that accentuated her fine frame. She headlined the first of Hammer's lesbian vampire trilogy, THE VAMPIRE LOVERS (1970), co-starred in the blackly comical segment of the superlative anthology picture THE HOUSE THAT DRIPPED BLOOD (1971) and took the lead in the ponderous, infrequently interesting COUNTESS DRACULA (1971). In 1973, Pitt was among the cast of a true classic of British horror, the original THE WICKER MAN starring Christopher Lee. 


It wasn't until HALLOWEEN (1978) that the Scream Queen terminology began gestating. Jamie Lee Curtis was well on her way to becoming the then reigning Queen of Scream successfully supplanting Barbara Steele with a string of horror lead roles. The daughter of Janet Leigh (the famed shower victim from PSYCHO [1960]) had become horror's darling literally overnight after playing the terrorized babysitter, Laurie Strode. Carpenter's classic led to lead roles in the mediocre PROM NIGHT (1979), the creep-tastic THE FOG (1979) and TERROR TRAIN (1980), a typical slasher boasting an interesting concept.

Up to this point, the role of a healthy lunged heroine was generally virginal, quiet, learned, respectful, educated, or possessed a position of some repute. Having sex was often the death knell for the disposable cast members in horror movies; especially slasher pictures, but not always. From here on out, an actress bearing the moniker of a 'Scream Queen' didn't necessarily have to survive the end credit crawl and many of them mostly played supporting roles, or had cameos. 

Getting naked was also an even bigger prerequisite than it had been the decade prior. The 'Have Sex & Die' aesthetic reached puberty in the 1970s, turning into a raging horn-dog in the 1980s; and, with the rise in evangelical propaganda equating free-spirited, lascivious activities with eternal damnation, baring more than one's soul meant you may as well have been wearing a red shirt on STAR TREK.

During this time, the torch was passed on to a young lady who was arguably the most famous of the 80s screamers, Linnea Quigley. Rarely ever a lead, Quigley was predominantly a victim, or sexy seductress. She's possibly the only actress who could make dialog about dying and being eaten alive an invitingly sexual prospect. The dialog in question being from her bra busting portrayal as Trash from the major 80s horror classic THE RETURN OF THE LIVING DEAD (1985). Quigley further solidified her willingness to lay bare her flesh when she strips away her remaining bits of clothing for a 'Dead Dance' atop a tomb much to the delight of young boys everywhere.

Quigley had a startlingly lengthy, and varied career in both good and crappy movies. She was also a surprisingly good actress; more so than you would expect from somebody who featured in movies with titles like CREEPOZOIDS (1987), HOLLYWOOD CHAINSAW HOOKERS (1988), SORORITY BABES IN THE SLIMEBALL BOWL-A-RAMA (1988) and ASSAULT OF THE PARTY NERDS (1989).

She started out doing some softcore erotica and even appeared in some scenes for PSYCHO FROM TEXAS (1980). She was famously impaled on some deer antlers in SILENT NIGHT, DEADLY NIGHT (1984), but it was her role as Linda Blair's mute sister in SAVAGE STREETS (1984) that really showed she could do more than amp up a films cheesecake quota.

She also had an incredibly loyal fanbase that exists to this day. There were other big name Scream Queens at this time like Michelle Bauer and Brinke Stevens, but Linnea Quigley had a special place in the hearts of hundreds of horror fans around the world. 

But whereas Jamie Lee kept her clothes on in her horror movies, Quigley and the many other femme fatales that followed laid the template by which so many exploitation pictures would study from. The Scream Queen soon morphed into a new breed of vocally strong femininity. They not only had a good pair of...vocal chords, but they also packed big guns, too. The voluptuous, sexually dominating schism of the Russ Meyer smut fests was married to the tongue in cheek Andy Sidaris' 'Sexy Girls & Guns' movies. This was a sub genre that proliferated and blossomed overseas in a steady stream of Hong Kong actioners throughout the late 1980s and into the 1990s.

Directors like David DeCoteau, Fred Olen Ray and Jim Wynorski explored the empowered Scream Queen as machine gun (or chainsaw) toting dominatrix in a steady stream of action-horror-fantasy non epics that were heavy on the skin, but light on plot and common sense.

Linda Blair came the closest to assuming the throne vacated by Jamie Lee Curtis, but Blair mixed it up a bit by shedding her clothes on several occasions in a healthy string of ultra violent revenge thrillers, trashy comedies and erotic-horror pictures. Blair burst onto the scream scene with her controversial classic THE EXORCIST in 1973, but it wasn't till she was all grown up and filled out that she really turned on the charm and turned on the male viewer during the 1980s. 

Blair bounced her way from a morbid mansion to dark, underground creepy caverns in the haunted house slasher classic HELL NIGHT (1981). In this film, she was the epitome of the resourceful Scream Queen. She was classy, didn't shed her clothes and could fix the perennial horror favorite--the car that won't crank!

Blair put on some pounds and was unfairly chastised in the mid 1980s. She was never fat (at least not to these eyes), she was just curvacious where it counted. She was the star of such notable trash like CHAINED HEAT (1983) and also in the excellent, ultra violent Lady DEATH WISH flick SAVAGE STREETS (1984).

The Empress of the stacked and ready to attack brand of fighting female would have to be Sybil Danning. She did relatively few horror movies (1976s JULIE DARLING and 1985s HOWLING 2 being two examples), but had no compunction about appearing in trash of the action or fantasy variety. 

Thriller Video gave the bosomy Danning her own video series called Sybil Danning's Adventure Video. The same company also did the same for Elvira, Mistress of the Dark.

Elvira isn't so much a Scream Queen as she is a horror show host, but she's an important cog in the vast horror machine. Her many sexual innuendos and comedic timing made viewing insurmountably awful movies worth sitting through on her immensely popular Movie Macabre nationally syndicated program. She was such an 80s staple, she even got two movies built specifically around her persona. A few years ago she was part of a reality show to crown a new Queen of Horror Hostess, but bad habits die hard and Cassandra Peterson is still enjoying being the bubbly vamp, Elvira.

Ladies like Tiffany Shepis and Danielle Harris are arguably amongst the best of the new bunch of horror heroines. They are of a relatively small number with the sort of signature personality that allows them to stand out from the pack. Shepis is easily the Linnea Quigley of the new millennium and Harris, having been onscreen in TV and movies since childhood, is actually a pretty decent actress in her own right.

Today, there are dozens of women in horror and actresses who do mostly work in the genre, but there's such a proliferation of them, the Scream Queen terminology doesn't quite have the same resonance it had in the 1980s. With so many, the market has gotten so saturated with lovely ladies and their slinky, well endowed figures, it's even more difficult to stand out now than before. But depending on what fans take from this surge in scantily clad, sexy sirens, this can either be a bane, or, in the likelier case, a blessing!