The Kill Bill Diary

Bill Death Do Us Part

The Kill Bill Diary
by David Carradine
Methuen ISBN: 9780713687781

Well this is a really breezy book and, as a result, this is probably going to be a really short review.

It’s not breezy because it has no substance... although, to be fair, in terms of full on details about the shooting of Kill Bill (Parts One and Two as it came to be), there’s isn’t a great deal of substance to be found in details of the actual production of the film. But that’s not the reason it’s so.... well... as I said, it’s just a pleasurable breeze to read through. No. The reason is because David Carradine is such an accomplished writer and has one of those useful writing styles that feels like you’re just sitting in a bar next to him, listening to the man talk. It’s a joy to read and... oh yeah... not without some interesting observations and stories, for sure.

This journal is split into a prelude, followed by a long Part One and then a shorter Part Two. I’m guessing the structure is meant to mirror the release pattern of the movies to some extent. In the prelude, Mr. Carradine tells us how he met Quentin Tarantino (the writer and director of Kill Bill, should anyone here be in doubt) and how he wandered into a long courting session in terms of chance meetings over the years to gain the role of Bill, the man everyone is talking about in the movie and who remains mostly absent from the first film. Or half of the film, depending on your opinion of the number count listed on the various Tarantino posters over the years.

And that’s the thing, this isn’t just about the shooting of Kill Bill... it’s also about the preparation for Kill Bill such as the rigorous, all day training sessions lasting many months that some of the cast, including Carradine, were put through to get in shape for the picture. It also looks at Carradine’s daily life throughout the whole period from pre-shoot to a gruelling selection of worldwide publicity tours for both films and shows him as someone who is, it has to be said... a bit of a cool cat.

Now I’m not someone who is that familiar with Carradine’s work. I never used to watch his famous TV show Kung Fu when it was on in the early 1970s but I do remember having a Kung Fu magazine with a big, fold out poster of Carradine that hung on my wall during that period. I don’t exactly know why my parents got it for me but... I suppose they used to like the show so, there it was in my room and the man used to watch over me while I slept, I guess.

I was aware of him, though, in a very interesting film I saw on television in the 1980s called The Silent Flute. I remember I really liked it and, decades later, I bought a Region 1 US DVD release of the film by Blue Underground under an alternate title, Circle Of Iron. Carradine remarks on the title changes of that film himself in this diary and, as it turns out, the man was a bit of an artist and all round free spirit. He made that flute in that film, as he has made a fair few over the years. He used to play them with his group until his untimely death a few years after Kill Bill and I was startled to discover, via this book, that the flute he uses in Kill Bill is, indeed, the same flute from The Silent Flute. In fact, as I discovered from reading this, one of the things Tarantino does to get people settled into his movies, especially when they are written for a specific person, is to have his art and costume department go around to the actor’s house and borrow loads of stuff from said actor's rooms and wardrobes in order to get everything reproduced by the various studio people. This is so that the actor will feel comfortable on set, half of which will be replicas of what he already has laying around... and be able to get into the role. I suspect Tarantino doesn’t do that with everyone mind but, it’s certainly what he seemed to be doing with Carradine.

And, like I said, its a very relaxing read and I learned a lot about Carradine. Enough, certainly, to make me want to read the autobiography he wrote many years before this one. I’ll have to get myself a copy of that at some point in the future. He comes across as a man very much at peace with himself and very much in love with his wife Annie, which makes his death a little down the line even more tragic and regrettable. He also had a very honest and straight forward attitude towards life, at least that’s how he came across in this book and not as the ‘crazy person’ he quotes from another famous writer/actor who read his earlier autobiography. Although I suspect that’s also true. Also quite witty at times such as when he describes one of a few times his car dies when he’s on the way to somewhere...

“Then I start to smell burning Bakelite, one of my favourite aromas. Especially in the morning. Smells like... expensive repairs.”

I’m sure most of my readers will have no trouble placing the movie quote Mr. Carradine is paraphrasing here.

As far as insight into Tarantino himself goes... well, he comes off fairly well, if a little demanding of his crew. I’ve always had a bit of a problem with Tarantino myself in that, I really like a lot of his films and think many of them... Kill Bill and Inglourious Basterds especially... are great works of art. However, whenever I see him interviewed he always comes across as way too full of himself and arrogant to the nth degree. Having said that, every time I read a first hand account from some actor or director or musician who has spent time with him, it always comes across that they always click straight away and fall in love with the charm of the guy right off the bat, using the common language of movies. So I think the only way I’m ever going to find out what this guy is really like is to hang out with him and have a conversation sometime. So, yeah, that’s probably never going to happen so I shall continue to admire his art from afar and, probably not have much good or bad to say about him other than what I can see from what he puts on the screen. Carradine, of course, absolutely loved him and it's evident on many a page that he believed (and he was possibly correct) that he was working on the best film of his career. And I’d probably have to take Carradine at his word in terms of how Tarantino is because Mr. C comes across so well in his words.

There are also, as you’d expect, encounters with other celebrities of the movie world and he has a lot of good things to say about many of his co-stars on Kill Bill. Uma Thurman and Michael Madsen both come across incredibly well, for instance. And Harry Knowles gets a few mentions (not to mention some reprints of his Kill Bill set reports from Aint It Cool News in this tome) too. There’s an interesting sentence at the end of one of the chapters about Knowles and I can’t tell if Carradine meant it in a joking way or if it was a bit of a put down of the man but, I guess I never will know now. Also, there are a few instances in the text where, obviously since the film was made by Miramax, Harvey Weinstein gets a mention. It’s interesting how a general 'off the cuff' remark made by Carradine describing people present on a night out can now, in retrospect, be seen in something of a different light since the whole ‘me too’ movement got going but it seems pretty clear to me that Carradine was certainly unaware and, possibly, naive to some of the things going on during those years. If he had been aware... no telling what he might have done, I guess.

And that’s all I’ve got to say about The Kill Bill Diary except, oh look, it didn’t turn out to be too short a review after all. I think you’ve probably go the gist of what I’m trying to say here though. As in... David Carradine, with a witty and laid back observational style that cuts through life sharper than a Hanzo sword, wrote a very ‘easy on the eyes and intellect’ journal of his experiences in making Kill Bill with Quentin Tarantino. It’s entertaining, fun and definitely worth some of your time if you are into such things. Definitely pick this one up if are. Read it.

Q (aka Q - The Winged Serpent)

Eggcentric

Q (aka Q - The Winged Serpent)
1982 USA 
Directed by Larry Cohen
Anchor Bay UK DVD Region 2

Well this is a curious little film I’ve just finally gotten around to seeing... after it being on my “to watch” list for a couple of decades. I was an admirer of this director’s famous “babies with teeth” trilogy It’s Alive, It Lives Again and It’s Alive III: Island Of The Alive which is, to be fair, equally confounding in its structure and tone. That trilogy was also a bit of a romp and I’m a sucker for those stop motion killer babies, even though they never look real (in much the same way that Ray Harryhausen’s creations never looked that real but you always made allowances because they were just so much gosh darned fun).

Q, for me, is a little bit more problematic.

It’s interesting because it starts with a flourish of brilliance in terms of the camerawork but, when the film starts proper, my first impulse was... “This is terrible.” However, it’s also quite compelling from a performance point of view and, coupled with the basic “1950s monster movie in 1980s clothes” appearance (or is that vice versa?), it makes for an uneven but never dull, treat.

The film opens with credits which are very clichéd in that they’re a roaming view of the streets of Manhattan from above... but then, as the credits finish, instead of just cutting to a new establishing shot, the camera kind of side-swipes left and we slam straight into a man on a rig cleaning windows on the side of a skyscraper. That was a pretty cool moment.  For me, that opening sleight of hand, which slightly shifts your perceptions of where the camera was filming from, is the most brilliant thing about this movie. As far as I’m concerned, it was all downhill from there but, like I said, it is kinda interesting.

The story, such as it is, starts off with a flying Aztecian serpent going around biting the heads off of random people, including the aforementioned window cleaner, who becomes a victim of its first “on screen” attack... although when I say “on screen”, the creature isn’t actually revealed in full until a little later. The film seems to be an “ahead of its time” homage to the 1950s monster movies which probably inspired it but, it’s not too long before the director is also revelling in the exploitation genre too, as we watch a toplesss and friskily endowed young lady sunbathing on top of her building and rubbing lotion onto herself... before she’s promptly chomped down as reptilian bird chow.

The story then changes tone and we get two things going on. On the one hand we have the introduction of David “Grasshopper” Carradine and Richard “Shaft” Roundtree as two detectives working the murders... which they will soon find is caused by Quetzlcoatl, the flying snake lizard thing. Simultaneously, we have an actor I’m really not that familiar with, called Michael Moriarty, who plays a small time, washed up crook. He messes up an audition playing piano which his girlfriend, played by Candy Clark, has fixed up for him. As a consequence of this, he is hired as a getaway driver on a diamond robbery but then gets roped in on the actual caper. Due to complications, he runs off by himself with the haul of diamonds (which he promptly loses when he gets hit by a car in busy traffic). When he runs from both the police and his fellow criminals, his fear and paranoia take him to the top of a skyscraper where he finds the nest and unhatched egg of the flying reptile... information which he keeps to himself.

From here on in, the different plot threads start coming together... kinda.

I don’t know. Although the film all makes sense, I did find it feeling like various scenes didn’t connect like they maybe should do... even though they clearly did. It might be because the film was shot very quickly... but it feels like, I don’t know how to say this properly so I’ll use an analogy. Remember those old polaroid cameras where you’d take a shot and the photograph would start developing when exposed to the air before your very eyes. Well this felt like that somewhat... but like you only got halfway through the developing process. You could see all of the picture but it looked kinda faded and only half glimpsed... somewhat. That’s how the movie “felt” to me.

The acting seems very naturalistic from both Moriarty and Carradine and I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of that stuff turned out to be ad libbed while the cameras were rolling. In that way, the disjointed, fragmentary nature of the various character’s encounters, such as I perceived them, seems more Altmanesque, in some respects. Certainly, Moriarty and Carradine both put in amazing performances in this... it just didn’t quite feel like either of them were particularly relating much to other characters they encountered the way they should be. Roundtree is also, of course, excellent in this but he doesn’t get much air time.

The monster effects are a real throwback to low budget 1950s shenanigans and appear to be a combination of stop motion and puppetry. For most of the build up into the early parts of the story, the monster pretty much is not in shot when it strikes, and this is probably a wise move by Cohen so he doesn’t alienate his audience right from the outset, I suspect. There’s never really a moment in the film when you become scared by the antics of the title creature... least of all when its gulping down on unsuspecting extras or protagonists. Frankly, I didn’t really care or believe in any of the people in this film enough to worry if they came to a sticky end but there were some little moments which make the film worth a look sometime... asides from the excellent acting.

One of these is when we cut to a shot of a stray human leg fallen onto the streets as the crowd panics. I couldn’t help but snort in laughter and it’s one of the things that makes me think that Cohen is very much “in” on the joke in terms of the amount of parody and homage in the movie.

The other thing is a jump scare moment which, although I didn’t really register, I would imagine must have been a quite spectacular adrenalin rush moment when this was shown in cinemas in front of a large, paying audience who would be concentrating on the action. In this scene, Richard Roundtree is standing on the roof of a building and you are maybe expecting a monster to attack him... as it happens, I wasn’t, but I’m guessing that’s why this sequence and the one soon to follow (which I won’t talk about) play out the way they do. In this one though, a kite suddenly lands in Roundtree’s face from the side of the screen... must have been a pretty big jump moment in cinemas, I’ll bet.

Other than this though, I can’t say there’s much to recommend Q - The Winged Serpent... especially if you break it down into little bits like I just did. I know this movie has a very passionate and dedicated following of people but it seems I’m not one of them. It’s not a film I would highlight to most people but it is an interesting watch, perhaps, if you’re into acting as an art form in and of itself and/or interested in B movie monster homage. I’m certainly more in tune with the latter and I’m certainly glad I saw it... but I can’t imagine I’ll be revisiting it that often again in my life unless I need to hook back into it for research purposes. Still... really don’t take my word for it because I know some people out there love this movie... and you may be one of them.

Whack Job Races

Deathrace 2000 1975 US

Directed by Paul Bartel Optimum DVD Region 2

Death Race 2008 US

Directed by Paul W. S. Anderson Universal DVD Region 2

Caution: Spoilers in the rear view mirror are closer than they appear...

It’s been a good decade or more since I last watched a print of producer Corman’s notorious trash classic Deathrace 2000 and, since I’d never seen the remake, Death Race from a couple of years ago, I thought I’d do a double-bill of the two movies to see if I could make any comparative judgements between the two versions. As you’ll soon see (or know if you’ve seen both), it’s very hard to compare the two.

Deathrace 2000 was a film which had a kind of notoriety when I was a kid growing up in the 70s... I remember the caretaker of the school I went to getting into trouble because he’d screened it for a bunch of 9 and 10 year olds as part of their film club not long after it came out (the movie was rated X in the UK at the time). Unfortunately I was not in attendance at that particular screening and it wasn’t until the home video boom that I finally got my chance to see the movie. Looking at the current DVD release of it sure brought back some memories.

From what I can gather, Corman’s original film seems to have a reputation for being a mean-spirited, nasty film with those who have not actually seen it as it centres on the drivers of a trans-American road race where the players score different point values for any innocent bystanders they run over and kill in the course of the race. It sounds like a gruelling watch but I can assure you that Corman and Bartel’s film is pitched with it’s celluloid tongue wedged firmly in its cinematic cheek. A strong dose of humour runs all the way through the picture and, although certainly violent and with some quite inventive and, dare I say, witty and surprising kills in the movie, it demonstrates a very knowing attitude to the ridiculous, over-the-top concepts portrayed in the film and doesn’t miss an opportunity to laugh at itself and push things way beyond the point where you start to giggle at the ridiculous antics on screen. Even the names of some of the drivers will give you some idea... apart from Machine Gun Joe (a fairly early post-porn role for Sly Stallone) you also have character names like Calamity Jane and Frankenstein (so named because his body has had so many horrific car crash injuries over the years that they have to keep rebuilding him).

What people who haven’t seen this movie don’t realise is that, quite apart from the race-around-and-kill-everyone-in-sight aspect of the film, there is also actually a plot (the year 2000 was in the far future don’t forget and sci-fi stories were getting another breath at the cinema) involving a group of rebels against the government who sanction the Deathrace every year and their attempts to sabotage the games and kill the drivers... there’s also another layer to this involving Frankenstein (played wonderfully by David Carradine) and his navigator (the daughter of rebel leader "Thomasina Payne") with a little twist in the Frankenstein character right at the end that you won’t necessarily see coming... involving his political leanings as symbolised by a hand grenade (quite literally a HAND-grenade but you’ll need to watch the movie to find out more).

All in all, still a refreshing and funny, inventive movie which features large dollops of humour and solid 70s sci-fi storytelling, interspersed with even larger dollops of those homespun Corman values which make up the essential components of the age old Hollywood success equation... nudity + violence = good box office.

Which brings me nicely onto the kinda inappropriate “remake” from a couple of years ago. This movie only half satisfies the above equation in that it ditches the nudity and keeps in the violence... unfortunately it also manages to ditch the sense of humour with it. Now I’ll go up front with my verdict on this one and say that Death Race actually is not a bad movie... it’s a modern exploitation film in much the same way as most modern day action movies might be seen as such and it’s got some entertainment value and it’s really not that badly made... but why did they have to tout it as a remake (so much so that it says something along the lines of “based on the Roger Corman movie Deathrace 2000 in the opening credits)?

Seriously, the only things that this movie has in common with Deathrace 2000 is it has some people driving fast cars in it and two of the character names are the same (Frankenstein and Machine Gun Joe). Unfortunately, because of the movies gestation and subsequent marketing, the audience is pretty much invited to make comparisons between the two movies which is a bad idea because, no matter how entertaining the new Death Race is on a visceral, modern action movie level... it’s just not got the same level of charm and wit as the original movie, even with the great Jason Statham (who is always watchable) playing the “new” Frankenstein.

This new version also does away with the idea of killing innocent bystanders for points... which was always one of the most talked about concepts of the original. Also, rather than racing across America... the races are held on an urban track in prison... since all the drivers in this version are convicts and the only people they’re trying to kill are other driver convicts. The plot is also a lot more personal and less about playing with big ideas than the original. Here, Jason Statham (a driving expert) is framed for killing his lovely wife by a prison warden who runs the race (played nastily by Joan Allen) so she can use him to double as the freshly deceased Frankenstein to maintain ratings of the live broadcasts of the Death Race. Prison yard posturing and Carmageddon ensues.

And from that paragraph you can just tell, can’t you, that they’ve watered down the original and gutted the concept of Deathrace 2000 like a fish!

Not to say the new one isn’t entertaining... it’s a fine entry in the modern trash cinema stakes and it does have it’s inventive moments... like the cars which power up various weapons and defences by driving over big pickup buttons in much the same way as a character in a video game will pick up various health and weapon power-ups. And, to be honest, the vicarious thrills engendered by this kind of movie are pretty much on the same level that the original movie was aiming for... so in some ways you can’t help but like the new Death Race just a little...

It just happens that the original movie revs itself up beyond 24 frames a second and forces the newer version off the side of the road in a heap of twisted, burning chrome...

But if you don’t need to pick one over the other then “doing the deathrace double” is a fine way to spend a Sunday afternoon. Just keep a watch out for that smell of burning rubber coming from your DVD player.