Kill Bill Vol. 1’s Crazy 88 Carnage

To begin, some numbers: 76, the number of stuntmen who made up the Crazy 88; 100, the number of gallons of fake blood used; 39, Quentin Tarantino’s age at the time of filming; and six, the number of years it had been since the director’s last film (Jackie Brown). Of all the Kill Bill numbers, though, the most important is 1970.

That decade’s singularly cool and violent Asian cinema inspired Tarantino to create his Kill Bill, uh, double-bill. Without it, we wouldn’t have Vol. 1’s gore-splattered apogee, in which Uma Thurman’s The Bride trades blade-blows, hacks limbs and sword-spanks an army of Yakuza. “I want it to be to kung fu fights what the Apocalypse Now ‘Ride Of The Valkyries’ scene was to battle scenes,” enthused Tarantino at the time, shooting at China’s Beijing Film Studio.

There, the House of Blue Leaves set was meticulously created by production designers Yohei Taneda and David Wasco, inspired by real-life Shanghai restaurant Gonpachi. “I set up the sequence so that either it would be the greatest thing anyone’s ever seen as far as this shit’s concerned,” the auteur said, “or I would hit my head on the ceiling of my talent.” He achieved the former. Beginning with a twitchy stand-off, in which The Bride is surrounded by O-Ren Ishii’s (Lucy Liu) masked army, it expertly ratchets the tension, before BAM! Blades slice, blood spurts, The Bride dodges and then, in her most unapologetic moment, she plucks out the eyeball of one of the Crazy 88… and now everything’s monochrome.

It was a clever ploy to ensure the film got an R rating as, over the next six minutes, The Bride eviscerates dozens of masked swordsmen, leaving only 17-year-old Hu Xiaokui untouched (“I thought, ‘There’s no way she’d off a kid with a mug like this,’” said Tarantino of the last-minute save).

Yuen Wo-ping (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) choreographed the clash, while Japanese legend Sonny Chiba both fought and taught combat. The emphasis was on old-school, with Tarantino insisting on shooting “the Chinese way”. Stuntmen popped concealed, blood-filled condoms at the right moments (a nod to Chinese director Chang Cheh, who invented the technique for his 1970 film Vengeance), and the result is a whirling dervish of an action scene and – still – perhaps Tarantino’s crowning cinematic achievement. Killed it. JW