Basterds is set around a historical event that never happened: Adolf Hitler and several other top members of the Nazi Party attend the premiere of a new propaganda film in Paris, an event that inspires two separate groups to make an attempt on the Fuhrer's life. And, as events that never happened tend to do, this event snowballs into more and more ahistorical events, culminating in a version of 1944 that is a good deal different than our own — to the point where World War II itself would have ended very differently.

Several critics on both sides of the "loved it"/"burn it" fence have termed the film a "Jewish revenge fantasy," an excuse to create a pulpy war movie with a villain we already know and hate. And, without getting too much into how the plot unfolds, it's certainly not the more usual type of alternate history. Instead of picking a point where history diverged and showing how the world has changed from there, Tarantino is slicing up the timeline before our very eyes.

Paul Donovan, in reviewing the film for Camp Kansas City, has perhaps the most astute observation on what Basterds accomplishes from a genre standpoint:

In 1978, an Italian film was released with the American name "Inglorious Bastards", about four U.S. soldiers on their way to prison who end up volunteering for a commando mission behind enemy lines. Tarantino took the name and the idea of rough-and-tumble American soldiers on a mission, and that's where the movie remake stops. His movie is a remake, all right, but not of any old movie. He had the audacity to rewrite history.

Quentin Tarantino remade World War II.

There's certainly a speculative bent to the Tarantino's grisly exercise, asking what might have to happen for WWII to end one way instead of another, what stars would have to align and what personalities would have to be in play. And, when war movies like The Dirty Dozen already add elements and events to history that simply weren't there, there's something appealing about an artist who owns his historical revisionism and goes all out to rewrite the ending.

But beyond asking how firmly Inglourious Basterds fits into the alternate history genre, I'm more interested in what happens after Basterds has left the theaters. Now that Tarantino has created an alternate universe, will we get more stories to populate it and show us how the world has really changed? Will it inspire other artists to create these in-the-moment historical remakes? And what does this mean for the future of Tarantino's movies? While his films often fall outside the realm of reality, they still skirt around science fiction and fantasy (with the notable exception of his screenplay for vampire slaughterfest From Dusk Till Dawn). Could Inglourious Basterds be the sign of more speculative fiction to come?

I love these images of spaceships and moonbases. Those Nazis sure can build. And you can check out the filmmakers' updates from Cannes on their Youtube channel.

[Iron Sky via Film School Rejects]

Motion Poster

From the people who brought you the weird Star Trek parody Star Wreck, Iron Sky imagines what happens if the Nazis landed, and prospered, on the Moon. It's written by Johanna Sinisalo, who won a Tiptree Award and the Finlandia Prize for Literature, for her novel Troll and has been nominated for a Nebula for her novella "Baby Doll." Here's the synopsis:

Towards the end of World War II the staff of SS officer Hans Kammler made a significant breakthrough in anti-gravity. From a secret base built in the Antarctic, the first Nazi spaceships were launched in late ‘45 to found the military base Schwarze Sonne (Black Sun) on the dark side of the Moon. This base was to build a powerful invasion fleet and return to take over the Earth once the time was right. Now it's 2018, the Nazi invasion is on its way and the world is goose-stepping towards its doom.

And the film just announced more of its cast members, including the "legendary Udo Kier":

German actor Götz Otto will step in the boots of the intelligence officer Klaus Adler, a fanatic Moon Nazi devoted on invading the Earth. Otto has previously appeared in numerous feature films and tv-series, including attempting to kill James Bond as Mr. Stamper in the film Tomorrow Never Dies...

The other two new cast members attached to Iron Sky are also from Germany.
Veteran actor Tilo Prückner (The Neverending Story) will design the wunderwaffe of the Fourth Reich as the Nazi scientist Doktor Richter.

The legendary Udo Kier (Dogville, Blade, Shadow of the Vampire) will appear as the Nazi Moon base commander Wolfgang Höss.

Earlier German actress Julia Dietze (1½ Ritter) joined the cast as Moon Nazi officer Renate Richter.

Here's The Teaser As Well:

I wouldn't exactly describe 1945 as a good book, but it is a great towering piece of cheese. If it was a movie, we'd be giving it a primo spot in our "found footage" series. Co-written with historian William R. Forstchen, it takes place in an alternate version of 1945.

But wait — it's not quite your standard Nazis-win-World-War-II book. Okay, it mostly is. But it's slightly different. In this version, Hitler gets injured in a plane-crash just before Pearl Harbor. While Hitler is in a coma, the remaining Nazi leaders manage to avoid war with the U.S., which concentrates on defeating Japan conclusively (and also crushes the Maoists in China.) The Nazis, meanwhile, defeat the Soviet Union and conquer Europe — except for England, with which they form an uneasy truce. But now, as both Germany and the U.S. declare victory, a new war between them seems to be brewing.

It's been said that a lot of alternate history contains an element of wish-fulfillment, and it's possible there's some of that at work here. After all, here's an alternate world where Communism pretty much gets nipped in the bud in the 1940s. As long as the U.S.finally does defeat Germany, you could argue that it's a nicer version of events than what actually happened. (Apart, of course, from all the extra Jews and other Europeans the Germans manage to slaughter in this version.)

In any case, whether 1945 is as historically dodgy as many have claimed, it contains several vital elements of total awesomeness. For one thing, the triumphant Nazi Germany spends its time developing what the back cover describes as "science fiction super-weapons." You think I'm kidding? How about rockets that are remotely guided via television cameras?? Or super jets with "drop tanks" to provide ground support? Plus super-rockets? And hydrogen-powered submarines?

Plus, every villain in the book is hideous and crazy. Hitler has surived the war, but thanks to his 1941 plane crash, he's scarred and demonic. And then there's the book's main villain, a Nazi agent named Skorzeny who's trying to sabotage the Manhattan Project. (In this universe, the U.S. doesn't have the atomic bomb yet.) At some point, Skorzeny gets injured and loses an eye, so he can get either an eyepatch or maybe some kind of cyborg eye. In this passage, our hero, the square-jawed Jim Martel, tries to shoot down Skorzeny's plane and fails:

Now, ammunition gone, he could only watch as the second and then the third plane lifted off. Unlike the second plane, the third stayed lowe as the pilot pushed in just enough left rudder to cause the plane to crab onto the edge of the grass strip so that it passed by not twenty feet away from where Jim stood. Otto Skorzeny looked down, grinning demonically.

And James Martel finally understood the meaning of hatred.

Lots of passages in the book end like that, by the way. There's also a sequence where Jim is accused (falsely) of being a double agent, and he stands up to the FBI bullies who are pushing him around. And it ends with the sentence: "Grierson was learning to hate James Martel."

Oh, and another Nazi agent, Richer, likes to kill and occasionally brutalize teenage girls. Caught in the act by some U.S. cops, he gets injured and captured. A cop named Lloyd points his shotgun first at Richer's chest, and then it slowly drifts downwards as Richer protests, "I was just having a litlte fun. It got out of hand, is all. I got excited. You know how it is." Lloyd replies: "Yeah, 'yer right. There ain't nothin' like havin' a little fun." As his shotgun continues to drift down... You can see where this is going, right?

"I wasn't the only one!" Richer's voice was high-pitched as a girl's.

"The other ones didn't have blood on their hands," the sheriff replied, then added calmly. "Now you see if you think this is fun, you Nazi bastard."

They left Richer lying there, his groin a red mass. He was still alive, but he wasn't having any fun.

I like the subtle understatement of "he wasn't having any fun." Plus it calls back to the earlier part where Richer says he was having fun. Subtlety is what 1945 is all about. There's also a wonderful subplot involving a sexy Swedish spy who seduces the president's Chief Of Staff and gets him to give her massive infodumps while performing an unspecified sex act. She has really big eyes that he can't resist.

Sadly, 1945 ends with a cliffhanger, and Gingrich and Forstchen have never continued the saga. Will the U.S. win this version of WWII? What about those Nazi science fiction super weapons? Will camera-guided rockets, with 1945-era cameras, really work? Maybe we'll never know.

[via Metafilter]

There isn't too much detail on this foreign monster flick that's set to release in January. But it does prove that zombies can live forever if frozen. Which leads me to the question: What would happen if zombies stumbled into The Thing territory? Now that's a hybrid movie I'd pay to see. Still the pictures from Dead Snow look intriguing enough to show at any foreign film fest in a major city, so hopefully it'll come to one near you.

[Dead Snow via Twitch]

If you're a mad scientist with cloning technology at your disposal and you're hell-bent on cloning someone to represent your organization, Hitler would probably be at the top of your list. Just rest assured that you wouldn't be the first to try it. Check out the list of some of the better-known Hitler clones.

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• They Saved Hitler's Brain: This 1966 film features Nazi scientists removing Hitler's brain and sending it to South America so he can later be cloned. Too bad the movie didn't deliver on the promise of the title. it features numerous scenes of men talking. And talking. And talking. In fact, you don't even see Hitler's still-living head until the film is almost over. Talk about your wasted opportunities.
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• The Boys From Brazil: This 1978 film features a real gem of a plot. Dr. Joseph Mengele, the Angel of Death of Nazi concentration camps, has survived and has been feverishly working to clone Hitler himself. In fact, he's created 94 of them. These clones have been placed around the world and raised by families. However, in order to mirror Hitler's childhood, each of the clones fathers have to be killed when they reach age 14, since Hitler lost his own father at that age. The film features terrific performances from Gregory Peck and Sir Laurence Olivier, but the Hitler clone is only a background device, and we never get to see an adult Hitler tromping around.
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• Wonder Woman: In the Wonder Woman episode Anschluss '77, Wonder Woman stumbled onto a ring of Nazis in the 1970s trying to clone Hitler. They manage to pull it off, although the scene where Hitler's body rises up to fill his old uniform is laughable at best. While we love sci fi gadgets that can pump out clones at the flick of a switch, the ghostly resurrection of Hitler looks more like magic than quasi-science. Check out the episode below: the cloning happens about 28 minutes in.
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• The Hate-Monger: Marvel comics offered up this Hitler clone who used a "Hate-ray" to make love and other emotions turn into hate. Hoo-boy. He even wore a huge "H" belt-buckle, just to make sure you knew he wasn't a loving kind of guy. He also wore a Ku Klux Klan style hood and often exchanged fisticuffs with Captain America.

• Sadly, we haven't seen a good book or movie that nails the Hitler clone storyline. In fact, the most evil clone movie that Hollywood has given us was 1996's Multiplicity, featuring Michael Keaton as multiple clones of himself. It's been eleven years, and we're still not able to wash the taste of it from our mouths.

Crunchy goodness: 2

Spinoffs/Sequels/Copycats: Joss Whedon was supposed to write and direct a movie, but now it's stuck in development hell.

Stunt casting: Chloris Leachman as Queen Hyppolita, Wonder Woman's over-protective mother, who's worried about letting Wonder Woman visit the unhygienic outside world.

The shit: When the boogie-woogie theme music plays and Carter spins around to create a burst of light and don her spangly costume, you can't help believing in Amazons.

The Wonder Woman Pages