The Great Tarantino Scripts of the 90s

When 1994 rolled around, the way I viewed movies was changing. This was the first year I'd go to movies under the influence of marijuana. Oliver Stone was the best director ever, and Quentin Tarantino just released Pulp Fiction which seemed like I was walking into a dream every time I saw it in the theater. John Travolta's career was over, and nobody really cared who Samuel L. Jackson was … but I'll get to this movie later.

Natural Born Killers was the movie for me. In 1994, I thought it was better than Pulp because the way it was shot and Ollie's cut cut cut got right to the heart of my MTV Generation mind. The violence was very creative and it starred Woody from "Cheers" as a psycho killer (Que'st-ce que c'est?). Not to mention it also had great roles for Rodney Dangerfield and Robert Downey Jr.

As recently as 1997, I defended the movie against one of my professor's in college who thought it was a terrible. Though I wasn't nearly as GI JOE Gung Ho about it then, I still thought it was impossible to deride the directing. When I watched it last year, I kind of see what he was getting at.

Natural Born Killers isn't a bad movie. The problem is the violence is Sylvester Stallone over-the-top. It's so bad I can almost hear Sammy Hagar songs in my head. It starts great, in fact, it's one of the best killing spree's in film history. Once the duo gets caught however, it's just a pure prison riot blood bath. The idea of filming a trashy TV show is good, and Tommy Lee Jones and Tom Sizemore are good, but, and pardon my child eyes, but there's good violence, and then there's unnecessary violence, and that's what this is. It's understandable why Tarantino, who wrote the script tried to divorce it.

In the early 1990s, there was this young screenwriter in Hollywood named Quentin Tarantino who had ultra-violent scripts for 4 movies floating around. Two of them he did (RezDogs & Pulp Fiction) and the other two were NBK and True Romance. If you watch all four together, you see many overlapping themes and plot twists, but man dead, what a time for Tarantino. It's tough to find a writer or director having so much material in such short of time. If you ever wonder why Tarantino movies come out as frequently as Beastie Boy albums nowadays, there's your clue.