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Kill Bill: Volume 1
Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill, Vol. 1, is trash for connoisseurs. From his opening gambit (including a "Shaw-Scope" logo and gaudy '70s-vintage "Our Feature Presentation" title card) to his cliffhanger finale (a teasing lead-in to 2004's Vol. 2), Tarantino pays loving tribute to grindhouse cinema, specifically the Hong Kong action flicks and spaghetti Westerns that fill his fervent brain--and this frequently breathtaking movie--with enough cinematic references and cleverly pilfered soundtrack cues to send cinephiles running for their reference books. Everything old is new again in Tarantino's humor-laced vision: he steals from the best while injecting his own oft-copied, never-duplicated style into what is, quite simply, a revenge flick, beginning with the near-murder of the Bride (Uma Thurman), pregnant on her wedding day and left for dead by the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (or DiVAS)--including Lucy Liu and the unseen David Carradine (as Bill)--who become targets for the Bride's lethal vengeance. Culminating in an ultraviolent, ultra-stylized tour-de-force showdown, Tarantino's fourth film is either brilliantly (and brutally) innovative or one of the most blatant acts of plagiarism ever conceived. Either way, it's hyperkinetic eye-candy from a passionate film-lover who clearly knows what he's doing. --Jeff Shannon

Kill Bill: Volume 2
"The Bride" (Uma Thurman) gets her satisfaction--and so do we--in Quentin Tarantino's "roaring rampage of revenge," Kill Bill: Volume 2. Where Vol. 1 was a hyper-kinetic tribute to the Asian chop-socky grindhouse flicks that have been thoroughly cross-referenced in Tarantino's film-loving brain, Vol. 2--not a sequel, but Part Two of a breathtakingly cinematic epic--is Tarantino's contemporary martial-arts Western, fueled by iconic images, music, and themes lifted from any source that Tarantino holds dear, from the action-packed cheapies of William Witney (one of several filmmakers Tarantino gratefully honors in the closing credits) to the spaghetti epics of Sergio Leone. Tarantino doesn't copy so much as elevate the genres he loves, and the entirety of Kill Bill is clearly the product of a singular artistic vision, even as it careens from one influence to another. Violence erupts with dynamic impact, but unlike Vol. 1, this slower grand finale revels in Tarantino's trademark dialogue and loopy longueurs, reviving the career of David Carradine (who plays Bill for what he is: a snake charmer), and giving Thurman's Bride an outlet for maternal love and well-earned happiness. Has any actress endured so much for the sake of a unique collaboration? As the credits remind us, "The Bride" was jointly created by "Q&U," and she's become an unforgettable heroine in a pair of delirious movie-movies (Vol. 3 awaits, some 15 years hence) that Tarantino fans will study and love for decades to come. --Jeff Shannon

Set Contains:

The Blu-ray discs of Kill Bill, Vols. 1 and 2 look and sound great. The colors--from the geysers of blood to Vivica Fox's candy-hued suburbia--are exceptionally vivid, as is the 48 kHz/24-bit uncompressed sound. The special features, however, are nothing special: they're in 480i standard definition and just the same ones that appeared on the regular DVDs. "The Making of Kill Bill" is a 22-minute documentary from 2003 in which Quentin Tarantino and Uma Thurman explain the creation of the Bride character, influences on the movie, working with The RZA, and discovering the 5,6,7,8s. Other interviewees include Vivica Fox, Lucy Liu, Julie Dreyfus, and producer Lawrence Bender. There are also two bonus performances by the 5,6,7,8s ("I Walk Like Jayne Mansfield" and "I'm Blue") and six Tarantino trailers. Vol. 2 has "The Making of Kill Bill" (26 minutes), one deleted scene of Bill fighting Chinese assassins while Uma Thurman's character watches admiringly, and a performance at the Vol. 2 movie premiere of the song "Malaguena Salarosa" by Chingon, the band started by Quentin Tarantino's friend and fellow director Robert Rodriguez. --David Horiuchi