A film by Quentin Tarantino is usually both predictably unpredictable and predictably bloody.

“Inglourious Basterds” is a good deal of the former and a sufficient quantity of the latter—one man’s therapeutic purge of his inner demons upon the silver screen. Tarantino’s characters aren’t real celluloid heroes—they’re archetypal graphicnovel representatives who masquerade as movie stars; they can run faster, jump higher and usually die more grotesquely than the real thing.

In other words, Quentin Tarantino may be a twisted puppy, but he’s often brilliantly twisted and mesmerizing in his approach to mayhem. I intuit by now that anyone venturing forth to see a Tarantino flick knows what he or she (and probably he) is getting into, so I shan’t wave red flags and shout: “Beware, gentle folk! This is not a morality-laden journey of man’s inhumanity to man!”

It is, rather, a stylized, bloodsplattered comic book run amok. Tarantino’s soiree into Nazi Germany is “KillBill”styled extravaganza, a loose, loose, brazenly loose, unrecognizably loose remake of “The Dirty Dozen,” Enzo Castellari’s 1978 “Quel Maledetto Treno Blindato”—itself a loose Italian remake—and nearly every Sergio Leoni film ever made.

The difference between “The Dirty Dozen” and Tarantino’s film is that, by comparison, “Dozen” is plotcoherent, sensitive, morally sound, and rather warm and cuddly.

Tarantino has gone one (or more) steps beyond, turning the war flick into: (a) a Jewish retaliation fantasy, (b) a mean-spirited sociopathic brawl and (c) a historical travesty, as if WWII were a distant memory open to chaotic interpretation.

Tarantino pretzels history into some utterly absurd alter-reality that defies categorization. Nothing new perhaps in Tarantino’s world, but a little jolting for those of us not firmly strapped into our theater seats.

By the way, if you’re a Tarantino fan, these words will only enhance your desire to see the film. Hence I suppose I speak primarily to the vaguely curious, the Tarantino-detached.

Much has been made of Brad Pitt’s portrayal of a dim Tennessee boy, Lt. Aldo Raine, who leads a squad into German-occupied France to wreak fear and terror among the enemy. (Among other atrocities, they scalp . Oh, and if anyone doubts Tarantino’s homage to the spaghetti western, one need only glimpse the hangman’s scar around Pitt’s neck. Clint Eastwood wore a similar mark in “Hang ’Em High.”)

Yet Pitt is very much a minor character here; Christoph Waltz is the film’s shining psychopath, playing Waffen-SS officer Hans Landa, a seemingly jocular sort who, by the end of just the first scene, proves terrifyingly persuasive . . . without ever raising his voice.

I’d tell you more, but I doubt you’d believe me. Eventually Lt. Raine and Col. Landa’s paths cross, as do the paths of Aldolf Hitler (Martin Wuttke), a German actress (Diane Kruger) turned Allied agent, a young Jewish theater owner (Mélanie Laurent) and several others who will eventually add to the body count.

Admittedly, Tarantino had me transfixed for the first hour. The lingering opening scene is brilliant, as is a pub scene where Allied infiltrators are trying to extract information while boisterous, drunken soldiers party around them. Tarantino is a remarkably astute filmmaker, and, yes, the man can ratchet tension like nobody’s business.

But he’s also prone to exuberance, like a joyful child perhaps, throwing all his toys into the air and exclaiming “Wheeee!”

Ultimately, that’s what “Inglourious Basterds” feels like: a potpourri of styles, intentions and gratuitously bloody moments; part tragedy, part farce, part carnival sideshow, ultimately blurring into a cacophony of cinematic noise.

Ultimately, sure—Tarantino fans will worship this one, but I wonder if they might be hypnotized by all the boisterous trumpeting, by the smoke and the mirrors and the illusion of grand parody, because underneath it all, “Inglourious Basterds” is a frenetic disconnection of elements looking for coherence and finding it only occasionally.

Note: For The Movie Nut’s take on Hayao Miyazaki’s “Ponyo,” see www.TheAcorn Online.com/movies.