Auteur Quentin Tarantino hopes to do for the Nazis what he's done for small-time Los Angeles hoodlums in a forthcoming film. German film critics are up in arms over the script, which got leaked online.
... The film project (working title: "Inglorious Bastards") by the US director of Pulp Fiction and Reservoir Dogs, which is a remake of a 70s war film by Enzo Castellaris, has already created a furious response from German critics. One said the effects of the "collision" between pulp fiction and Nazi barbarity were "completely unpredictable".
The film depicts scalpings, disembowelment and swastikas being engraved in foreheads as a group of American Jewish soldiers are airdropped into Nazi-occupied Europe to wreak revenge on the Germans.
Film buffs were yesterday poring over what appeared to be the Tarantino script of the film, which has apparently been leaked and posted on several internet sites. Although film experts said the 167 page "final draft" had Tarantino's handprint all over it - including his wobbly handwriting, spelling mistakes (Inglourious Basterds) and grammatical errors - it had not been confirmed as genuine last night. There was speculation that it might have been released as a publicity stunt. ...
If the script is anything to go by, even by Tarantino's blood-curdling standards the film looks likely to be a stomach-churner. Apart from baseball-bat bashing and skin engravings, we see one German officer being shot in the testicles, as well as scalps being peeled "like a banana skin" from others.
The pulp fiction treatment is even given to the killing of a Jewish family being harboured by a French dairy farmer, who are machine-gunned to death through the floorboards of their hiding place.
"This is pop culture meets Nazi Germany and the Holocaust with an unprecedented force," wrote the film critic of the Süddeutsche Zeitung, Tobias Kniebe, in an attempt to sum up the explosive effect the film is likely to have in Germany.