Kill Buljo

There's a bit in Multiplicity where one of the Keaton clones says something to the effect of "when you make a copy of a copy, it doesn't turn out quite as crisp." Ditto Kill Buljo, a Norwegian send-up of Quentin Tarantino's burlesque two-volume mishmash, Kill Bill. Like Tarantino's pop culture epic, Kill Buljo begins in black-and-white, with Joompa Torman (Stig Frode Henriksen) half-assing his way through his engagement party. Apropos of nothing, Joompa and his entire wedding party are visited by a group of stylishly costumed thugs, leaving everyone dead, save for Joompa, who winds up comatose. Cue 90 or so minutes of booze, bullets, anal rape and arterial spray as Joompa tracks down and kills those responsible for spoiling the wedding he didn't really want in the first place. Instead of taking his cues, like Tarantino did, from the existent wash of pop and cult culture, director Tommy Wirkola lifts his visual style and hyper-kinetic violence from Tarantino directly. There's some new material here, including a subplot about a fanatical cop caught between Joompa and those on his "death list," but the bulk of the film is a cheap facsimile of Tarantino's cheap facsimile, right down to the shot of tinted sunglasses on the dashboard of a cop car. Wirkola seems a competent enough director, at least in his ability to passably put on his best QT impression, but anything resembling his sensibilities is mostly relegated to a bunch of tasteless stereotyping of Norway's indigenous Sami people. There may be something to be said for Wirkola's ambition in reworking the narrative and thematic pop tropes of Kill Bill. But considering that Tarantino tends to trade exclusively in stock characters, scrounged narratives and car trunk POV shots lifted from elsewhere in the annals of cult cinema, Kill Buljo begs the question: why didn't Wirkola merely string together his own cinematic smorgasbord? Apart from the now requisite 20 minutes of trailers, this disc offers nothing in the way of extras.