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Scalp Fiction

"Holocaust movies always have Jews as victims," Quentin Tarantino huffed to The Atlantic in a recent interview. That explains why the daring writer/director decided to take that very concept and blow it to pieces in "Inglourious Basterds," a fantasy retelling of World War II. It's an outrageous, wild ride of a film that calls for a case of Red Bull more than a box of Kleenex.

The story opens at a farmhouse in Nazi-occupied France, circa 1941, where a man (Perrier LaPadite) is hiding a Jewish family beneath the floorboards. In walks Colonel Landa (a brilliantly ominous Christoph Waltz), sniffing around and interrogating him in slow-boiling, Chinese-water-torture fashion. Eventually guns blast and the Jews are murdered, with the exception of Shosanna (Mélanie Laurent), who dashes away and vanishes into the trees.

That's the saddest part of the movie, and Tarantino is sure to get that out of the way soon after the opening credits. Next up we meet the Inglourious Basterds, a group of American Jewish rebels led by "Aldo the Apache" (Brad Pitt, doing his best Coen Bros.-esque hick impression) set on annihilating the Nazis and ending the war. "We will be cruel to the Germans," says Aldo, instructing each hunter to bring him 100 Nazi scalps. Oh, and he pronounces it "Gnat-See," which never seems to lose its thrill.

Tarantino has a thing for torture (see Mr. Blonde in "Reservoir Dogs") and revenge (see The Bride in "Kill Bill"), and both come out swinging in "Inglourious Basterds." It's amazing he has time for either considering how much dialogue is crammed into the two-and-a-half-hour movie -- rest assured it's the engaging "Pulp Fiction" kind, not the innocuous sort found in "Death Proof."

On the torture front, you'll see scalps sliced off, swastikas carved into foreheads and a baseball bat used as a lethal weapon. (The Bear Jew (Eli Roth) just loves to hit grand slams with Nazi brains.) Revenge is splattered throughout the movie but the standout involves a grown-up Shosanna, now running a movie theater in Paris, in a jaw-dropping finale that has more in common with "Cinema Paradiso" than "Boy In The Striped Pajamas."

On the totem pole of Tarantino films, I'd stick "Inglourious Basterds" (quite the spell-check nightmare) under "Pulp Fiction" and "Reservoir Dogs," over "Jackie Brown" and "Death Proof." There's enough ridiculous fun, torment and biting dialogue to keep things pumping for the duration, even with some lag in the "Operation Kino" chapter, featuring Diane Kruger as a German actress/undercover agent.

Tarantino is a master of self-indulgent cheek-pinching and genre shakeups, managing to turn his films into must-see events -- he's like Peter Jackson that way. Though he's no stranger to violence and retribution, "Inglourious Basterds," with its Jews-Gone-Wild spin, just may be his most badass movie yet.