Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair (4th Anniversary Show)

At 5.30pm

Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair

Pat’s Film Club turns four this month, and the birthday show has always been the one I take most seriously. We opened the club with RRR, the Telugu action film I had seen at the Cineworld in Plymouth and been completely blown away by, and which never played in Cornwall at all. Year two was a martial arts double bill, Enter the Dragon and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Last year, my favourite film of all time, The Godfather.

This year it is Kill Bill: The Whole Bloody Affair.

I have always wanted to show a Tarantino at Pat’s Film Club, and you have always asked me for one. I did try. A couple of years ago I wanted to do Pulp Fiction as an anniversary screening, marking its Palme d’Or at Cannes. The distributor, Park Circus, had held it back over the anniversary itself, so we could not get it. It was properly re-released later in the year and played four or five shows at the Plaza, just not under our banner.

Kill Bill is the title that keeps coming back, and I love both films. But when Volume 1 came out, I had already heard about a legendary longer cut called The Whole Bloody Affair. Kill Bill reached us as two separate films about six months apart, and the word was that Tarantino had made one epic and had been persuaded by Harvey Weinstein to release it in halves. So he recut it, re-edited it and added material to make two films stand on their own with a cliffhanger between them. That gave us Volume 1 and Volume 2, both of which we know and love. But the original cut existed. It just was not shown.

There was something else that those of us who get geeky about this knew. The sequence that climaxes Volume 1, the showdown at the House of Blue Leaves, went out everywhere except Japan in black and white, because of the bloodshed and the worry about the rating. It is superbly stylish in black and white. It was not what Tarantino originally intended.

Then, a couple of years ago, word started going round that The Whole Bloody Affair might finally get a release. It had played a few times on 35mm at the New Beverly, Tarantino’s own cinema in Los Angeles, and had gone down very well. We waited with bated breath. Last December it came out over here, and where I could get to it, it played for one night only. I could not make it. I have wanted to see this version for twenty years and I still have not seen it.

Uma Thurman has never been better in anything, and she should be, because the film was written for her. Tarantino has said the idea came out of a conversation with her while they were making Pulp Fiction, a revenge picture built around her, and then it took him ten years to write. Around her: Lucy Liu as O-Ren Ishii, who is very nearly the main character of Volume 1, Vivica A. Fox, Michael Madsen, Daryl Hannah as Elle Driver, David Carradine as Bill, Sonny Chiba as Hattori Hanzo, Gordon Liu as both Johnny Mo and Pai Mei, Julie Dreyfus as Sofie Fatale, and Michael Parks turning up twice, as Earl McGraw and Esteban Vihaio.

I am not claiming this cut is better than the two separate films. I have not seen it, so I do not know. Most people think it is, but who knows, and it does not stop you loving Volume 1 and Volume 2 the way I still do. What it does is let us take the whole thing as one massive story in a single night and get completely immersed in it. Never have Tarantino’s obsessions, with B movies, martial arts, exploitation and revenge pictures, been better harnessed, controlled and stylishly made than in Kill Bill.

It is long, so we start at 5.30pm rather than 6, half an hour earlier than usual. There is an intermission, so there is time for a drink, the loo, and a refill of the popcorn bucket.

And it is a Pat’s Film Club night, with my introduction, the trailers, and everything that comes with one of our shows. It is the enthusiasm and the passion of everyone around you that makes it bigger than going to the movies, and I think this is going to be the most amazing evening.