FEW film-makers flaunt their influences as brazenly as Quentin Tarantino. He can talk for hours about the Japanese yakuza movies, nouvelle vague directors and Swedish psychothrillers that inspired his own movies. His Jackie Brown (1997) reads like a love letter to 1970s blaxploitation movies, and Reservoir Dogs was dedicated to eight “sources of inspiration”, including Jean-Luc Godard and the king of American B-movies, Roger Corman.

Tarantino is even more explicit with his tributes in his Kill Bill films, the second of which is released this month. This week the ICA in London is screening four films — two Japanese, one Swedish, one American, all violent — that are particular inspirations.

These, among others, gave Tarantino the framework for the story of the Bride (Uma Thurman), who wakes from a coma to avenge the death of her fiancé and unborn baby by killing the assassins she used to work with.

The theme of vengeance is shared by three of the four films being shown at the ICA. In Female Convict Scorpion (1972), a wild girl breaks from prison to attack the captors who had beaten and raped her. In Lady Snowblood (1973), the second Japanese offering, a girl avenges the murder of her father and the rape of her mother. Meiko Kaji plays the avenger in both films, and Tarantino acknowledged her influence by including a song by her on the soundtrack to the first Kill Bill film.

The Swedish film Thriller: A Cruel Picture (1974) inspired Tarantino’s character of Elle Driver (Daryl Hannah), the assassin who tries to murder the Bride in Kill Bill Vol 1. It is a cocktail of art-house style and hardcore porn content in which a woman (played by the Swedish porn star Christina Lindberg) is forced into heroin addiction and prostitution.

She secretly learns a martial art and later kills all the men (and one woman) who have forced themselves on her. The blood flows freely. By the end of the film Lindberg is sporting a black eyepatch (the result of a grim scene in which a client puts a scalpel to her eyeball) and chic black clothes — a look mirrored by Elle Driver.

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The fourth ICA film is the trashy The Doll Squad (1973), an American B-movie about an all-girl crime-fighting team that is said to have inspired the TV series Charlie’s Angels (Lucy Liu, who was in the big-screen spin-off, appears in Kill Bill Vol 1).

For Tarantino, it is an honour to take inspiration from these films that defined his early years as a film fan. But his approach is more modern than simply cutting and pasting from his encyclopaedic knowledge of international B-movies. He is acknowledging the legacy of these films while at the same time creating his own new cinematic language.

For audiences more used to straight remakes of such anodyne 1970s staples as Charlie’s Angels and Starsky & Hutch, a dose of Female Convict Scorpion mixed with Tarantino’s high-budget panache is an electrifying and unusual prospect.