SCALPINGS, disembowellings, mutilations, baseball bat bludgeonings and other assorted fits of violence aside, Quentin Tarantino’s latest film, Inglourious Basterds, is a World War II film you can take your Holocaust survivor grandparents to see.

Why? Because in Tarantino’s occupied France the Nazis are crushed in a violent explosion of ignominy and physical pain, and also because the film succeeds where most other World War II films fail. It’s a ripping hoot.

Sometime after the Macaroni Combat (Italy’s hammed-up answer to films like The Dirty Dozen) exploitation movies of the ’60s and ’70s, people stopped making camp war adventures, opting instead for earnest pathos-  drenched allegories about the human spirit in the face of overwhelming adversity. Suffice to say, Inglourious Basterds is a World War II epic with a difference, primarily because Tarantino is not bound by hopeless reverence, discretion or even reality. His plan is simple – take the most insidious, unsympathetic lot in recent history and brutalise them.

It’s not an original concept, but sometimes it’s not the trailblazers that get the kudos for spawning genres and sub-genres. In this case, Tarantino’s signature filmic mash-up, which is heavy on knowing nods and homage, has spawned a sub-genre affectionately named “Jewish revenge porn”.

The great man introduced himself with a “How ya going mate?” attempt at the Australian accent on the red carpet of the film’s Australian premiere.

“You could call it a Jewish revenge fantasy,” Tarantino says, mock-  baulking at the “Jewish revenge porn” title through a cheeky grin. But he clearly likes the moniker. He might as well have given a nudge and a wink at the end of the sentence.

“Well, actually this is more of a Macaroni Combat movie,” he adds.

While Tarantino is not Jewish, the opportunity to direct his trademark violence-as-high-art without corollary – he’s killing Nazis after all – was too difficult to resist. And while revenge is a theme in several of Tarantino’s films and clearly fills him with glee, he is aware of the effect it could have on Jews.

“I told some Jewish friends about my idea and they were like ‘You have to do this movie. Forget whatever else you’re doing and go out and get it done.’ I was already really excited about it too, so that’s pretty much what I did.”

The film tells two stories that run concurrently. The first is about a handful of Jewish American soldiers headed by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a soldier with Apache lineage, who has a penchant for carving swastikas into the heads of his victims. The Basterds roam behind enemy lines in occupied France doing unspeakable things to Nazis and become storied figures, feared by Hitler himself. Meanwhile, Shosanna (Melanie Laurent), a French Jew, is plotting to bring down the Third Reich after her family was brutally murdered by the remorseless SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), or the Jew Hunter, as he is known.

There are a number of Jewish actors in the film, most notably Eli Roth, director of horror flicks Hostel and Cabin Fever. Roth plays Basterd Sergeant Donny Donowitz, also known as the Bear Jew, a soldier with a reputation for caving in Nazis’ skulls with his signature baseball bat, and the most feared man in occupied France.

Jewish actor BJ Novak (the US version of The Office, Knocked Up) also stars in the film as Private First Class Smithson Utivich, a junior member of the Basterds. But it is unknown Austrian TV actor Waltz who steals the show with his diabolically evil Nazi enforcer.

At 53, Waltz was plucked from obscurity to play the plum role of the charming, insidious Jew Hunter. Tarantino has a reputation for reviving, establishing, or at least enhancing, the careers of the actors he uses (John Travolta in Pulp Fiction, Pam Grier in Jackie Brown, David Carradine in Kill Bill: Vol 2), and Waltz is no exception. His portrayal of Landa earned him the coveted best actor gong at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year. By Tarantino’s own admission, the Jew Hunter is “one of the best characters I’ve ever written”, and while that fact is not lost on Waltz, he is quick to point out that it was a struggle to leave his misgivings about playing a sadistic Nazi tyrant at the door.

“The character is so extreme and the difference between me and this character is so big, that trying to bridge this gap would be, in a way, foolish because there is no way from one side to the other. So I have to find little loopholes and gaps to fit through,” Waltz said.

“I tried to leave my preoccupations behind, which in this case is kind of difficult. I cannot play my judgement. I cannot play my opinion. In this case it is very difficult because one has a very definite opinion about [Nazis], so there is no progress to be made with this as an actor so this is how I approached this role.”

Just days before the film made its Australian debut at the Melbourne International Film Festival, it was shown in Germany and Austria. Waltz said there was some trepidation about how the film would be received in that part of the world. But he needn’t have worried.

“On account of [Germans’] very intensive preoccupation with the [Holocaust], they are the ones who fantasise most about what happens in the movie. So when you finally see your fantasy being projected on a huge screen it is a relief, without overlooking the historical responsibility. What happened can’t be undone, but isn’t that what we all, in our secret fantasies, are hoping for, even though it’s 60 years after the fact? Quentin had the guts to put it on the screen,” Waltz said.

Former German model and ballerina Diane Kruger (best known for her role as Helen of Troy in the disastrous adaptation of Homer’s epic Troy) plays Bridget Von Hammersmark, a German movie star and turncoat for the British. Kruger said the sensitive nature of the film’s themes was a motivating factor, rather than a deterrent.

“That was one of the reasons I wanted to make the movie,” Kruger said.

“When you’re born in Germany and worked a lot in France and the US, you get offered a World War II movie every week. I’ve always turned all of them down because being German, I didn’t want to be just associated with that one particular subject. I feel like there have been so many movies about that, good movies, important movies, but I didn’t want to be associated with that. But when this came along, I thought ‘finally’, it was such a different take and daring and I felt like only Quentin could get away with changing history like this.”

Kruger said while her German heritage linked her to the atrocities of the Holocaust, it made being part of Tarantino’s historical re-  imagining intensely gratifying and a catharsis of sorts. While the film appears to have struck a chord with Jewish audiences, German audiences and the press alike have heaped praise on the film. The reason, according to Kruger, is its resonance with a generation of Germans still grappling with their dark past, a generation of which she is a member.

“We brought down the house in Germany [at the premiere of the film]. There was a true sense of relief, I feel like Germany’s ready to be done with it. “For the Germans, especially my generation … oh … if we could we would have killed them [Nazis’] ourselves. I have had just as much joy seeing Hitler get shot in the face and get killed and see Nazis massacred, as the Jews would have.”

While Tarantino’s crowd pleaser appears to have satisfied all the people all the time – a couple of less than favourable reviews aside – there will no doubt be detractors that accuse the film of trivialising the Holocaust. But with Jewish heroes at the film’s core and such an unapologetically absurd premise, it will be a difficult point to push and secretly, they’ll love it anyway.

Inglourious Basterds is playing in theatres nationally.