A farcical bloodbath: After four years, Quentin Tarantino is back with a vengeance in the stellar Kill Bill

This moment," croons Bill, to the pregnant bride dying in his arms, "this is me... at my most masochistic." Bang.

In the year 2003, Uma Thurman would kill Bill. Or so she thought. We're not quite sure who Bill (David Carradine) is, but the lucky bastard's been given a new lease on life: Volume two of Quentin Tarantino's fourth film won't hit theaters until next February. Miramax studios spliced the unwieldy 3-hour splatter-saga into two shorter segments, the first of which debuts tomorow. Uma won't kill Bill until 2004, but in the meantime, there's vengeance to be had.

View it on an empty stomach.

"Revenge is never a straight line," we're told, because that would be too easy. Tarantino toys with breathless, graceful kung-fu-nouveau; but compare this to the Matrix and you, too, might get the sword: Kill Bill is one of a kind. There's an interlude of anime, some gritty, melodramatic black and white footage, a little bit of kitsch and a little bit of class. Kill Bill is the shamelessly indulgent conglomerate of Things Quentin Likes. We know who's in charge here.

Uma Thurman, the Bride, is the tenth and final victim of a wedding-party massacre, gunned down in a dusty Texas chapel on the outskirts of nowhere. Four years later she awakens from a coma, screams a few times and scrawls a "Death List" in black Sharpie on a piece of notebook paper.

Numbers one through four on the list are members of the Bride's own team, the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. Alumni include Lucy Liu (code name Cottonmouth); Vivica A. Fox (Copperhead); Michael Madsen (Sidewinder); and Daryl Hannah (California Mountain Snake). Of course, in that grand tradition of saving the best for last, the mysterious Bill, leader of the pack, is number five on the lady's list.

The Bride herself is the perfect picture of blood spattered determination, hacking and chopping her way through the underworld elite. "It's mercy, compassion and forgiveness I lack," she clarifies. "Not rationality."

Or a sense of humor. Is there some magic threshold, at which point violence transcends drama and becomes comedy? When the Bride destroys mob-momma Lucy Liu's personal platoon, leaving limbs, heads and guts spattered across the floor of a Japanese guesthouse, does the violence really register? What about when she commands survivors to flee, instructing them to leave all severed body parts behind? "They belong to me," she bellows. What's she going to do with them? Eat them?

Forgive us. It was funny. On some level, nausea gives way to giddy pleasure, and the quiet satisfaction of pop-art contrast between red blood, white snow and one sleek yellow jumpsuit. Still, Kill Bill's bound to elicit its fair share of murmuring and head-shaking. A frontal lobotomy is cooler than outright decapitation. It's fun, but is it really necessary?

Violence has a few unwritten rules. Those rules have exceptions.

Sometimes the dog dies, and sometimes even the prettiest girl succumbs to a flesh-eating virus. But a gunshot to the pregnant bride? Is it too much?

Girl-power revenge might be the theme, but we're talking knife fights, not cat fights. "In this world," Tarantino said to the press, "Women are not the weaker sex. They have exactly the same predatory hunting instincts as the men, the same drive to kill or be killed."

Tarantino has also been criticized for encouraging children to attend his film. "Boys will have a great time, girls will have a dose of girl power," he said at the London premiere. "If you are a cool parent out there go take your kids to the movie."

Was he serious? With all the free publicity, it doesn't even matter. Aliens stalk us, dinosaurs eat us, and if we've learned anything from Starship Troopers, it's only a matter of time before extraterrestrial insects slash this worthless civilization into oblivion. A little cinematic splice-and-dice is just our way of embracing the inevitable.