If so, bring out the balloons. He's back in an emphatic way with his homage to B flicks, "Kill Bill: Volume 1," a chopsocky action feast blazing with old-school chic, samurai swordplay and copious blood that sprays from wounds like water from a busted fire hydrant.

"Kill Bill" is pretty awful — a crushing, interminable bore nude of wit and surprise. (My cardinal rule of movie watching: Don't bore me.) While it has the style and self-conscious groove Tarantino trademarked in "Reservoir Dogs," "Pulp Fiction" and "Jackie Brown," the movie completely lacks his famous verbal bite and aficionado's gift for reconstituting '70s pulp cinema into a post-modern exhilaration. (The dreary "Jackie Brown," a so-called tribute to blaxploitation, suffered the same fate.)

Where the earlier movies pretzled genres, "Kill Bill" is a wearisome exercise in recycling. For starters, those cartoony blood geysers are right out of animé, manga and Asian martial arts pictures from the '70s, though most viewers will think it's Tarantino's idea. Only his indulgence is his. He wrings the coolness out of the spectacle through endless, ain't-I-clever repetition.

And isn't a martial arts extravaganza so five years ago, especially for a hipster like Tarantino? "Kill Bill" comes way after the mainstreaming of Hong Kong action films, the impact of Ang Lee's stately martial arts epic "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" and all of the "Matrix" backwash, which is so ubiquitous that Diane Lane probably twirls through the air with a sword in "Under the Tuscan Sun."

Part of the reason "Reservoir Dogs" (1992) and "Pulp Fiction" (1994) were so brilliant was because they felt entirely new. Tarantino blindsided us with spunky pop culture allusions and verbose lowlifes who turned banal observation into funny pop poetry.

You can see Tarantino straining to be clever and edgy in "Kill Bill." The fact that he's cast David Carradine — you know, the old "Kung Fu" television show guy — as Bill is its own lame punch line. Uma Thurman's avenging babe (wearing Bruce Lee's yellow leather jumpsuit — another hip reference, ha ha) gets stuck driving a pickup that looks straight out of a '70s Hot Wheels catalog. Emblazoned on the tailgate is an alpha-male obscenity that recalls Samuel L. Jackson's expletive-embossed wallet in "Pulp Fiction," but this one's not funny because it's hardly believable someone would tool around town with such a slogan. (Jackson's groovy Jules would carry that wallet, though.)

By far the movie's most embarrassing attempt at nostalgia chic is when Thurman looks a foe in the eye and says blankly, "Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids." It's come to this.

No film this year has approached the vacancy of "Kill Bill" and none has so lavishly stumbled on its own juvenile swagger. It gropes at super-coolosity — all those worshipful shots of Thurman's slinky death machine and a funky retro soundtrack — and pop-culture cutes and comes up empty.

Yet it will kill at the box office, sucking in audiences piqued by the re-entry of QT, as well as the legions of adolescent (and arrested adolescent) boys who like Kevin Smith's movies and Harry Knowles' movie reviews.

Tarantino is calling "Kill Bill" a "duck press" of the grindhouse pictures he's watched over the past 35 years. Unfortunately, that's what this genre jumble feels like — a clumsy pastiche of other, better movies, given the kiss of cool by Tarantino. The older films are generally trash, yet they exert a campy fascination today because they are of their time. Do we really need a new blaxploitation or redundant martial arts flick when we can rent the real thing?

One wonders if Tarantino can create a movie universe out of whole cloth, not just crazy quilts patched from other movies. His schtick, dazzling in "Reservoir Dogs" and "Pulp Fiction," is getting old. While I refuse to believe Tarantino has lost his touch, he is working in a different age, an ironic meta-age, and the things that worked in his early pictures don't necessarily work anymore.

Critical word on "Kill Bill" is unaccountably ecstatic. The response harks to the hyperventilation over "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," which besides being paced like a dirge (something "Kill Bill" shares) was merely a slicker version of the stuff Tsui Hark was doing in Hong Kong 10 years earlier.

People are desperate for something different, which may explain the fulsome overpraise for a film like the sweet but limited "Lost in Translation." Theaters are clogged with mediocrity, so when a movie comes along draped in anticipatory buzz or name-brand cachet, well, that's something. "Kill Bill: Volume 1" is definitely something, but it's a pretty worthless something.

cgarcia@statesman.com; 445-3649