Quentin Tarantino's fourth feature is a deliriously enjoyable tribute to the sort of cheesy titles the filmmaker discovered and came to love during his salad days as a video-store clerk. We're talking no-holds-barred action films, Hong Kong martial-arts extravaganzas, tough-guy melodramas.

Content? Not important. Here delivery is everything, and Tarantino delivers like a man born with film developer pumping through his veins.

Early in "Kill Bill," the Bride (Uma Thurman) pulls up in an obnoxious customized yellow pickup truck outside a routine suburban home. She rings the doorbell and is greeted by a housewife (Vivica A. Fox) with whom she immediately engages in a full-blown, furniture-bashing, blade-flashing brawl to the death.

The mayhem is interrupted only when the housewife's small daughter returns from preschool. Got to act nice in front of the kid.

That sort of laugh-inducing, head-shaking, turn-on-a-dime narrative shift is evident everywhere in "Kill Bill," which, like one of its well-trained murderers, knows how to jab and feint while never taking its eyes off its central theme of pure, bloody revenge.

OK, this is a good time to say that "Kill Bill" is possibly the goriest mainstream film ever. Limbs are cleaved, bodies pile up like cordwood, severed necks spray fountains of red. But here's the thing: It's so over the top and stylized that it bypasses "gross" and goes directly to cinematic abstract expressionism. It's too exciting and too beautiful to be offensive.

As we discover in fragmented flashbacks, the Bride (we never learn her name, and when somebody utters it aloud the soundtrack covers it with a bleep) was a professional killer, a member of the Deadly Viper Assassination Squad. The DiVAS are run by a shadowy and unseen (in this movie, anyway) fellow named Bill.

On her wedding day, the pregnant Bride (who like all the assassins has a snake-related code name — hers is "Black Mamba") and other members of the matrimonial party were massacred in the church by Bill and the Vipers. After four years in a coma, the Bride has awakened with just one thing on her mind: Kill Bill.

This first episode (the second half is scheduled to come out Feb. 20) finds the Bride squaring off against Copperhead (Fox) and making her way to Okinawa, where in a curiously gentle passage she convinces a master sword maker (action star Sony Chiba) to come out of retirement and fashion a blade worthy of her hatred.

"Kill Bill: Vol. 1" ends in Tokyo, where the Bride takes on Cottonmouth (Lucy Liu), who has parted with Bill and is now Japan's top yakuza. In delivering Cottonmouth's back story, Tarantino makes his most daring leap: the 10-minute sequence is delivered as anime, the distinctive Japanese animation style.

As he did with "Pulp Fiction," Tarantino divides his film into chapters. He drops in visual elements recycled from his earlier movies — look for posters for Red Apple brand cigarettes — and delights in eye-popping color schemes (that obnoxious yellow truck has a bright red interior).

The music ranges from fierce flamenco to Ennio Morricone lyricism to a dirge-like rendition of Sonny and Cher's "Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)" by Nancy Sinatra. The fight scenes — staged by Chiba and "Crouching Tiger" vet Yuen Wo-Ping — are spectacular. Especially wonderful is the climactic battle between the Bride and dozens of black-suited yakuza thugs — it makes the "burly brawl" in "Matrix Reloaded" look like a peewee football scrimmage.

Throughout, Tarantino packs tons of meaning and flashes of mordant humor. Each shot seems to have three or four things going on at once — visual jokes, acrobatic action, a soundtrack that sounds as if your sense of hearing has gone hypersensitive with hissing blades and bone-crunching thuds.

As for acting — well, everybody is just as good as they need to be. Thurman certainly looks the part as the lean, lanky and driven Bride, and within the strict emotional parameters afforded by this sort of affair she actually exhibits a fairly wide range.

"Kill Bill" doesn't ask us to identify emotionally but rather to react viscerally. This is both the film's one weakness and its greatest strength. It is what it is without apology.

The decision to divide the film's long original cut into two separate features is wise not only on a financial basis but on an artistic one. At three uninterrupted hours, the essential emptiness of "Kill Bill" would become all too evident. This fast-moving, cartoony epic is best taken in smaller bites.

Besides, now we can spend the next few months arguing over where the tale will take us next. Why were the Vipers ordered to kill the Bride? Who was the Groom? What happened to the Bride's unborn child?

And mostly, will she find a way to kill Bill?