Kill Bill: The 10 Most Badass Things The Bride Did, Ranked

Content Warning: the following article contains discussions of brutal violence and sexual assault.

Quentin Tarantino has created a number of badass heroes over the years. In Pulp Fiction, Butch returns to the pawnshop basement to save Marsellus with a samurai sword. In the final act of Django Unchained, Django frees himself, liberates his wife, and blows up the plantation that held her captive. In Inglourious Basterds, Jewish soldiers shoot Adolf Hitler in the face.

But arguably Tarantino’s most badass hero is Beatrix “The Bride” Kiddo, the ex-assassin who spends the two volumes of Kill Bill seeking revenge against her would-be killers in gruesome fashion. These are the most badass things she does in those two movies.

10 Bringing A Knife To A Gunfight (And Winning)

The in-media-res opening of Kill Bill: Volume 1 picks up in the middle of the Bride’s “roaring rampage of revenge” as she confronts Vernita Green in her tranquil suburban home and engages her in intense hand-to-hand combat. They call off the fight and go into the kitchen for coffee when Vernita’s young daughter Nikki comes home from school.

The two make plans for a knife fight in a baseball diamond in the middle of the night, but then Vernita tries to gun down the Bride in cold blood with a pistol she has hidden in a Kaboom cereal box. The Bride kicks her coffee mug at Vernita and throws a knife into her chest during the split-second she’s distracted by it. The Bride brought a knife to a gunfight – usually used as a metaphor for inevitable defeat – and won.

9 Biting Off Her Attacker’s Lip

When the Bride awakens from her four-year coma, she’s horrified to remember that while she was still comatose, a hospital orderly named Buck was repeatedly sexually assaulting her and taking bribes from random truck drivers to come in and do the same.

She pretends to still be in a coma when the latest offender enters her hospital room. When Buck leaves him alone with the Bride, she bites down on his lip so hard that she rips it off his face, eventually killing him.

8 Repeatedly Slamming A Door On Buck’s Head

After killing the trucker, the Bride goes after Buck himself. She cuts the back of his ankle, causing him to fall to the ground.

As Buck writhes in pain on the hospital floor, the Bride sticks his head in the doorway and slams the door against his head until he stops moving. It’s a brutal method of killing him, but no fan is too sad about it after the flashbacks showing his heinous crimes.

7 Defeating The Entire Crazy 88 Goon Squad

A possible reason why Tarantino split Kill Bill into two parts is that Volume 1 already had an explosive final battle to end on. With its nearly 10-minute-long ballet of blood, kinetic wire-fu fighting, and Japanese surf music, The House of Blue Leaves massacre is one of the most thrilling action scenes ever put on film.

Before she can battle O-Ren, the Bride is forced to fight her opponent’s intimidating goon squad: the Crazy 88. With dozens of lethal members, including a psychotic Japanese schoolgirl assassin named Gogo Yubari, the Crazy 88 initially overwhelm the Bride before being systematically decimated by her at the end.

6 Claiming Ownership Of All The Limbs She Chopped Off

The massacre at the House of Blue Leaves is easily the most spectacular sequence in the Kill Bill duology. At the end of the sequence, when every member of the Crazy 88 has either been killed or seriously injured by the Bride, the survivors limp out of the building through a sea of blood and severed limbs.

Triumphant, the Bride claims ownership of her vanquished foes’ limbs: “Those of you lucky enough to still have their lives, take them with you! However, leave the limbs you’ve lost. They belong to me now!”

5 Cutting Off The Top Of O-Ren Ishii’s Head

Once the Bride has decimated the Crazy 88, she’s invited up onto the snowy rooftop garden for a final showdown with O-Ren Ishii. Following a sleekly choreographed swordfight in a snowy Japanese garden, the Bride manages to cut off the top of O-Ren’s head.

This visually stunning fight scene is an overt reference to the jidaigeki classic Lady Snowblood, which was a huge influence on Kill Bill’s style, tone, and aesthetic in general.

4 Surviving A Shotgun Blast To The Chest

When Kill Bill: Volume 2 catches up with Budd residing in a dusty, run-down trailer in the middle of the desert, it seems like he’ll be easy to kill.

However, when the Bride sneaks into his trailer in the dead of night, she finds him waiting with a double-barrel shotgun. He shoots her in the chest and calls a friend over to help him bury her alive. Although Budd was one step ahead of the Bride in this instance, the fact that she survived the shotgun blast is pretty impressive.

3 Breaking Out Of A Buried Coffin

After Budd anticipates the Bride’s surprise attack and fires a shotgun into her torso, he and his buddy bury her alive in the grave of Paula Schultz, who is believed to be a descendent of Dr. King Schultz, the dentist-turned-bounty hunter played by Christoph Waltz in Django Unchained.

By remembering her mentor Pai Mei’s teachings about patience under pressure, the Bride manages to break out of the coffin with her bare fists. Like a classic Universal Pictures horror monster, she climbs out of her premature grave and is ready to find Budd and finish the job she started in his trailer.

2 Gouging Elle Driver’s Other Eye

Elle Driver is introduced as the Bride’s eyepatch-wearing arch-nemesis. Even before the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad left her for dead, the Bride shared an intense rivalry with Elle. This rivalry is teased throughout both Kill Bill volumes before reaching a climax when the Bride returns to kill Budd, only to find him already dead by Elle’s hand.

Their standoff in Budd’s trailer, however, is surprisingly anticlimactic. With Ennio Morricone’s “A Silhouette of Doom” on the soundtrack, Tarantino builds to what promises to be an explosive fight between the two women.  Yet after a brief clash of samurai swords, the Bride simply pulls out Elle’s other eye and blinds her. There’s no protracted fight choreography like the House of Blue Leaves massacre; instead, the Bride ends the fight quickly and brutally, dispatching her opponent in the most unforgivable way possible.

1 Killing Bill With The Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique

With a title like Kill Bill, there was always a strong possibility that the movie would end with the Bride killing Bill. While she does eventually slay her former lover, it is how the Bride kills Bill that is so badass.

Fabled to be the deadliest move in martial arts, the Five Point Palm Exploding Heart Technique was taught to the Bride by Pai Mei, Bill’s former mentor and the Bride’s chief architect in her quest for revenge. Pai Mei didn’t even teach that technique to Bill so when the Bride uses it to kill him at the film’s conclusion, there’s a good sense of poetic justice. She used the one fighting method Bill didn’t possess to finally finish him off and end her need for revenge.

About The Author

Ben Sherlock
(3458 Articles Published)

Ben Sherlock is a writer, comedian, independent filmmaker, and Burt Reynolds enthusiast. He writes lists for Screen Rant and features and reviews for Game Rant. He’s currently in pre-production on his first feature (and has been for a while, because filmmaking is expensive). You can catch him performing standup at odd pubs around the UK that will give him stage time. Previously, he wrote for Taste of Cinema, Comic Book Resources, and BabbleTop.

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