For those who haven't seen it yet, Inglourious Basterds is Quentin Tarantino's alternate history of World War II, about a fictional band of bloodthirsty Jewish soldiers called the Basterds. Led by southern white boy Brad Pitt, the group roves around Europe, leaving hundreds of scalped Nazis in their wake. Their current mission is "Operation Kino," a suicide bombing run where they'll attend (and blow up) the Paris premiere of Joseph Goebbels' latest propaganda flick, Stolz der Nation (Spirit of the Nation). Lucky for the Basterds, the woman who owns the theater is actually a stealth Jew whose family was murdered by Nazis - so she's got her own explosive plans for high-ranking officials attending the event.

The movie is as much about movies as it is World War II. The war's historical details are smudged throughout with imaginative flourishes that speak mostly to contemporary fantasies borrowed from action flicks. A standout is Hostel director Eli Roth, known for his torture-laced movies, playing "the Bear Jew," who likes to smash Nazi heads open with baseball bats. Another great moment comes when the stealth Jew theater-owner Shoshanna describes how to fight back against the Nazis using the power of film. At first it seems as if she's made another version of famous French resistance movie Open City. But no - she just means that movies are incredibly flammable. If she lights her film collection on fire, it's going to make one hell of a bomb.

A highlight of the DVD extras is a fairly long interview with Tarantino and Pitt, in conversation with film critic Elvis Mitchell. They talk about how intense it was when they showed the film in Germany, and Tarantino speculates that this is perhaps one of the only movies that gave Germans permission to laugh at Nazi history rather than feeling guilty about it. He says there's a whole generation of Germans who had nothing to do with the Nazis' crimes, and that they all carry around this burden of guilt which is reignited by movie after movie - and yet something about Inglourious Basterds allowed them to see their history in a new light. Possibly it's this same aspect of the film that caused some Jewish groups to attack the movie for anti-Semitism.

Film nerds like me will love the special features that explore all the cinematic influences on the movie, including Enzo Castellari's 1970s flick Inglorious Bastards. Tarantino and Roth talk about how much they loved the original film, and we get to see a quick behind-the-scenes on Castellari doing his cameo in the movie.There's also a quick tour from critic Mitchell through the rare movie posters on display in Shoshanna's movie theater, which help explain some of the references in the film, as well as the fictional posters created for Tarantino's alternate history.

Best of all is the fake "making of" documentary about Stolz Der Nation, the movie-within-a-movie which was directed by Eli Roth. And of course, there's Roth playing the director and talking about how great it is that Hitler is going to write an endorsement of the movie.

If you liked the movie in the theaters and just want to plunge more deeply into the piles of references that inform it, or if you didn't get a chance to see it yet, you'll want to check out the Inglourious Basterds DVD.

[Harry Knowles Twitter via CHUD]

Thanks to Titan Books for sending us these exclusive extracts from the BSG season 4 companion book, out now to coincide with the release of the direct-to-DVD "The Plan." No, they won't explain that whole "Opera House" thing, but they are pretty fascinating.

So here are five things you never knew about Battlestar's final season:

1/ As the production began the casting process for an actor to play Starbuck¹s father, they realized that they needed a performer who could not only act, but was also an accomplished musician. That¹s not a small thing to ask, and at one point, the production thought they might have a solution get musician Bear McCreary to play the part himself! McCreary agreed to audition. "I thought, he¹s about the right age, he's a good looking guy, he'll look good on camera, and he can play." laughs director Michael Nankin. "Why not?". During the audition, however, it was mutually decided that music
was where McCreary¹s considerable talents lay! "For the good of the show, and of humanity in general," McCreary jokes on his blog, "I didn't get the role"

2/ Aaron Douglas does an extremely good impression of Edward James Olmos, to the extent that if Olmos was away from set when a read-through has been scheduled, Douglas would stand in and read Olmos' lines

3/ The interest with going the whole hog in blowing Gaeta's leg off was influenced by the question of who may have been directing the episode. "There was a rumor that Quentin Tarantino was interested in doing an episode and his schedule only allowed him to direct during the dates that 'Faith' would go into production," explains [episode writer] Seamus Kevin Fahey. "So, there was a small element of making it this bloody, awful, insane, Tim Roth squirming in the back of Mr. White's car-type teaser. It didn't work out, but I remember that being a germ of inspiration while working on those scenes. Director Michael Nankin did an amazing job with that sequence. It's so brutal. I loved it." Presumably if Tarantino had directed, someone would have also had to lose an ear.

4/ The ship, the Battlestar Galactica, was absolutely integral to the series. Besides lending her name to the show, she was where most of the action of the series had taken place - and so choosing the right way for her to make her exit was important. "Once we had decided that Galactica was going to get to Earth in the distant past, the question was, 'Well, what are we going to do with the ship?" says Ron Moore. "We played around with that quite a bit in the fourth season.". The writers discussed various options before making the decision to send Galactica and the rest of the fleet into the sun. "At one point we talked about maybe burying the ship, and maybe in a flash forward to contemporary times, there were these mounds of unknown origin in Central American," recalls Moore. "That was something Bradley Thompson was talking about. We were going to have someone digging into one of these mounds and discovering metal - and there would be the side of the ship. We also had a version where Adama decided to burn the Galactica, like Cortez burning his ships when he got to the New World"

5/ Ron Moore, a self-confessed Navy buff, says the scenes portraying the build-up to the attempted mutiny aboard the Demetrius were specifically influenced by the Caine Mutiny, a 1954 film set aboard a US destroyer and starring Humphrey Bogart. In the film, the crew are successful in their attempt to remove the single-minded Captain Queeg (Bogart) and are court-martialled on their return to port. Moore was also interested in the look of the Caine, which was a run-down, clausrophobic ship, and the Demetrius also took on those properties, Moore was so pleased with the resulting set that he called the art department together to praise them personally. This initially caused panic amongst the crew until they realised the summons was for good news, not bad.

Battlestar Galactica: The Official Companion Season Four on Borders.

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'm all for the Werewolf ladies turning into a comic but why stop there? These crazy gals and their werewolf feeding Nazi den of booze and singing deserve more screen time. Who doesn't want to see the naked masked Nazi ladies of death camp 13, let alone the crazy experimentation that went into making a "pure" wolf person.

But while were looking back at the Grindhouse fake trailers I think we need to note Eli Roth's Thanksgiving clip as well. "You'll come home from the holidays in a body bag," is by far one of the top all time tag lines in horror movies. What petition do I need to start to get that film made?

NSFW trailers for Nazi Werewolves, Don't and Thanksgiving.

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