With his wide appeal to a diverse audience, Quentin Tarantino occupies an unusual position among contemporary American directors. His penchant for excessive, graphic, and gruesome violence wins him legions of viewers in drive-ins and grindhouses across the land (his alleged satire, the dull, labored "Grindhouse" underlines his debt to those fans); on the other hand, his mingling of farce with pretentious imitations of various popular genres - the "Kill Bill" duet and "Pulp Fiction" - delight the denizens of the art houses and inspire paroxysms of praise from reviewers.

The director's new movie, the heavily hyped "Inglourious Basterds," follows the general pattern of his previous work in its mayhem and bloodshed, its satirical and farcical moments, and its exploitation of film history. Copying those World War II ensemble action flicks like "The Dirty Dozen" and "Where Eagles Dare," Tarantino sends a group of mostly Jewish soldiers, under the leadership of Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), behind enemy lines with a simple mission - to terrorize the German army. Their actions include ambushing German patrols, torturing and mutilating survivors, and a really horrific moment when one of them beats a soldier to death with a Louisville Slugger, all the while screaming baseball terminology of a much later era. They also scalp their victims, a bloody practice that justifies their nickname, Aldo's Apaches.

At the same time, the movie cuts to other stories, marked as chapters with their own titles, particularly one involving a young Jewish woman, Shoshanna Dreyfus (Melanie Laurent), the sole survivor of the massacre of her family. Under an assumed identity, she runs a movie theater in Paris, which serves as the setting for the film's apocalyptic climax. The SS colonel who orchestrates the massacre, Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), links all the plots, personally killing almost as many people as the Apaches, interrogating all the important figures in the film in an exquisitely sadistic game of cat-and-mouse, and finally inventing an ingenious way to save his own skin when the war ends.

Chopping up the movie into chapters obscures an essentially clumsy job of editing, which skips numerous important connections of plot and character, and damages unity and coherence. As a result, "Inglourious Basterds" mostly depends on a series of discrete moments, scenes, and sequences with only the thinnest relation to other segments of the film. The uncertain editing also creates a most unbalanced narrative, so that some important sequences dissipate most of their initial power and meaning through their length - the film not only repeats Colonel Landa's circuitous interrogations too many times, but even duplicates them in another long sequence involving a British spy and a German double agent that ends in yet another bloodbath.

As usual in a Tarantino picture, "Inglourious Basterds" employs innumerable references to other works of cinema and other directors. It often illustrates the introduction of a character with a flashback, sometimes in orthodox cinematic manner, sometimes in comic book form, sometimes as a newspaper story, even with brief clips from older films, as when a reference to nitrate film stock splits the screen for few seconds with a moment from Hitchcock's "Sabotage." The director even includes a Nazi propaganda film as the showpiece for a gathering of the German high command, including G�ring, Goebbels, and Hitler himself.

Perhaps because of his cheerful approach to scalping, mutilation, and torture, Brad Pitt's character provides most of the humor in the movie, though his best scenes involve his comic and entirely inept impersonation of an Italian producer at the premiere of the Nazi film. Christoph Waltz's Colonel Landa, however, not only connects all the plots and people, but really dominates the whole picture, bullying, wheedling, charming, threatening his various victims in four languages, and brilliant in all of them.

The mixture of history, comedy, and bloody action has inspired some critics to describe the picture as a "dramedy," a bastard word itself, which I hope dies an early death. Its thematic conclusions, its carefully edited climax, however, with its balanced cross-cutting, alternating close-ups, and a dazzling ascent to a crescendo of annihilation, demonstrate that "Inglourious Basterds" actually belongs in the category of fantasy, possibly fulfilling Quentin Tarantino's own dreams of bloodshed and apocalypse, accompanied by his familiar manic cackling.