Heads up, Tarantino freaks: those culture mavens at New York magazine’s Vulture blog got their mitts on the maestro’s screenplay for Inglorious Bastards (or as the hand-scrawled cover has it, Inglourious Basterds), the World War II epic set to start shooting in October. Or at least, they’re pretty sure they have it. “We wondered at times if this script was a fake, and it's still possible that it is — but if so, it's such a skillful fake that the author has even mastered Tarantino's ability to write moments that seem almost like parodies of his own tastes.” I’m not sure I’ve unraveled exactly what that means, but it doesn’t necessarily sound like a good thing.

The Vulture does proclaim Bastards to be “exactly as batshit over-the-top insane as we hoped… The script is 165 pages long and follows a squad of American soldiers called the Bastards — a guerrillalike force who travel behind German lines in 1944, striking terror into the hearts of Nazi soldiers. The Bastards are headed by Lieutenant Aldo Raine — the role we'd imagine Tarantino is hoping to land Brad Pitt for — described by the script as a ‘hillbilly from the mountains of Tennessee,’ who has around his neck a scar from where he survived a lynching… The script is definitely the ur-text of Quentin Tarantino's career up to now; it combines his love of old movies (war movies, Westerns, and even prewar German cinema), his attraction to powerful female protagonists, his love of chatter, and his willingness to embrace the extreme — visually and in his storytelling...All in all, it reads like Kill Bill meets The Dirty Dozen meets Cinema Paradiso.”

If the title sounds familiar, it’s because QT lifted it from a 1977 Italian war movie directed by Enzo G. Castellari, due out on DVD in a deluxe 3-disc edition (!) at the end of this month. Until then, you can read the rest of Vulture’s take on the script here.

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