You either love Quentin Tarantino’s movies or you think they are disgusting. I fall into the second camp. To lift a line from the best acted role in Inglourious Basterds, If 99.9% don’t die it’s not a Tarantino.

My purpose is to dissuade you from going to see the film, so if that seems improper for a review, stop here. There are plenty of reviewers who think highly of his work and will pitch you with “swaggering fun,” extremely witty,” gleeful violence,” and such. [Actually, only 74% at Rotten Tomatoes don’t give it a “splat.”]

Tarantino and some of his admirers think of Inglourious Basterds as a Jewish revenge fantasy. If so it is a fantasy on every level. It fantasizes that for Jews to fight back they cannot be Jewish; they can have no relation to the laws of the Torah or the teaching of the Talmud, lo these two thousand years. They must ignore the laws of war and kill everyone, surrendered or not. And, of course, since they are still “Jews,” they must be led by a non Jew — Aldo Raines (Brad Pitt) from eastern Tennessee.

It’s as if Tarantino walked into the producer’s office and began: “I’ve got a great idea for a WW II movie! No, no, it’s a really great one! We turn the tables on the Nazis. Instead of Nazis locking Jews in a church and burning them to death [recall the crime in The Reader, a very good film,] a Jewish girl locks the doors on 350 Nazis in her movie theater and burns them to death! Pretty good, huh? Oh, oh, they’re also shot with machine guns, while they’re jammed up against the doors! Great huh? Red Nazi banners. Red flames! Red blood. Slow motion of course. Oh, man it’ll make millions! Oh, and it’s a slasher movie — we show some scalping! Sticking a finger into a bullet wound! And a comedy! And a war movie. Lots of black leather, and… ”

Of course in Hollywood, the producer stops him: “Say no more. How much do you need?”

Most of the reeeeeaaaally long 2 and 1/2 hour film wasn’t worth seeing and isn’t worth spending a lot of time reviewing.

Suffice to say it’s a story in which the platoon of American Jews, led by their falsely drawling Aldo Raines [homage to Mr Macho Aldo Ray, get it?] wreaks havoc on the Nazis in occupied France in about 1944. They are as vicious as the Nazis they are pursuing. In fact whether their victims are SS troops or plain old mud-soldiers doesn’t matter to them. The only good German is a dead one.

For sauce, Tarantino drips a little line of goo that the Jews, including one named “The Bear Jew” — who kills Germans in captivity, to the amusement of his comrades, with a baseball bat — were known as Apaches; they give war hoops and take scalps. Eli Roth, famous for his own blood and flesh steamers by the way, plays The Bear Jew, and directed the film within the film, Nation’s Pride, ostensibly by Goebbels.

The culminating piece of disgusting imagination is that Jewish Shosanna Dreyfus, the owner of a small Parisian cinema, who we have seen in the opening scene survive the murder of her family, creates a crematorium for the German High command and their 300 odd friends. They have come for the premier of Joseph Goebbels latest movie, Nation’s Pride, as he attempts to free German cinema from the scourge of Jewish control. It’s an Audie Murphy like shoot-em-up in which a single German, Frederick Zoller, kills one American after another, for three days. Body after body goes sprawling in the film-within-a-film as Shosanna waits for her trap to spring. And it does. A pure Tarantino fantasy. It’s not enough that the flames are roaring, the people screaming, the bodies falling and the blood flying. A large filmed image of the maniacally laughing Shosanna — “You will die at the hands of a Jew!” — oversees their deaths, and fills the sound track in her theater and ours, and finally goes up in flames itself.

In Gandhi’s immortal conception, the good guys become as evil as the bad guys until we can no longer tell them apart.

The fantasy is a child’s throughout. The Jewish Apaches roam the countryside without being seen, under no threat of discovery and make their kills at times and places of their own choosing. The sound of gunfire brings no enemies to investigate. The set up for the climactic scene in the theater is so implausible that it’s actually distracting. There are no Nazi security checks of backstage where the fire is prepared, or the basement where the nitrate film is stored. There is no thorough inspection of the premises with soldiers left to stand guard –even with every major name in the German High Command in attendance. No one stays with the projectionist during the showing.

When the blood begins flying you get yet another view into Tarantino’s ten year old soul: a superman fantasy in which the only morality is to soak the ground with the blood of your fantasized enemies, and as long as it’s about blood, throw in your heroines, too.

It will occur to some, as it did to me, that the Germans and their French friends watching Goebbels’ masterpiece, cheering and applauding death after death are behaving much as we are, watching Tarantino’s identical fantasy. Perhaps we are not standing and cheering, but we are gripped in fascination as the bad guys die. If by our word of mouth the movie rakes in millions that will be the sound of our cheering.

It made me wonder for which Reich Tarantino is the wannabe master filmmaker.

It’s too bad, actually. There were two very good scenes that deserved a good film. The opening shots of the terrifyingly friendly Col Hans Landa [Christoph Waltz] tightening the noose around the lives of a sturdy French dairy farmer’s family as he tries to keep the presence of his Jewish neighbors hidden, is very fine stuff — until the silly Sherlock Holmes pipe is pulled out. And a tavern scene late in the film in which secret agents dressed as Nazis try to out fox a suspicious Major, in the middle of a drunken first-child celebration in the basement tavern, is riveting. Interesting that the most serious acting was done by those cast as Germans. Melanie Laurant was fine as Shosanna, particularly in another threatening scene with Col. Landa over whipped cream and champagne. But her role, under Tarantino’s grand vision was to be be beautiful, dress in red, and die. Not too demanding.

I couldn’t help but wonder, as the image of Shosanna melted in the flames, and she lay dead on the projection room floor, of just what it means to burn your own house down to get revenge — and whether the allegory is apt. Some would say so.

If the San Francisco Chronicle’s Little Man, signalling response to a movie by his position in his chair, had an image bending over and vomiting it would be my choice for this film.

My advice: don’t encourage Tarantino’s fantasies.