Inglorious Basterds is, of course, an exercise in B-movie excess, the latest Quentin Tarantino homage to the 70s editing, lighting, and sensibility. But once you get past the carnival trappings of Inglorious Basterds, you will find perhaps one of the most strident, affectionate, and sympathetic feminist films ever made. Inglorious Basterds isn’t really about a bunch of renegade American soldiers taking Nazi scalps; that premise was just put in there to fill the seats. (Who doesn’t want to see the Nazis get their comeuppance?) Rather, it is a film how men have nothing less than a spectacular obliviousness to how women think, the situations women endure, and the depth of a woman’s power. The real Inglorious Basterds of this film are not Brad Pitt and his crew of cartoon characters; rather, it is Shoshanna Dreyfus (played to cornered savage animal perfection by Mélanie Laurent) and Bridget Von Hammersmark (a glamorous turn by Diane Kruger). Man, if you haven’t figured it out by now, you’re hopeless. Once again, Quentin Tarantino has built a shrine to the warrior woman (Jackie Brown, Zoe Bell and her crew, The Bride, Honey Bunny and Mia Wallace), and there’s no two ways around. Mr. Tarantino LOVES strong women. That is the heart of his auteur career.

Tarantino makes mostly wise choices in Inglorious Basterds, the first of which is limiting Brad Pitt’s screen time. Now Pitt is a fine actor, but his primary weakness is that simply he simply lacks cinematic presence. My eyes are never drawn to him. The camera does not love him. He does not exude any power. Contrast him to the amazing Christoph Walz, who plays the diabolically intelligent Colonel Hans Lada. He may not have the movie-star looks of Brad Pitt, but he commands the screen with a terrible power. You may argue the reason he chews up every one of his scenes is because he’s written to be the main bad guy, but a good script can only get an actor so far. Walz ends up with a good chunk of the screen time, and for good reason. Every scene he is in just crackles with tension and fear, and there is a mesmerizing power in Walz’s performance. That man has presence.

Another wise choice Tarantino makes is avoiding what I term the Special Agent Stupid Girl convention that plagues so many films. The convention dictates that women, even heroic ones, are instantly beset with hysteria and panic whenever confronted with danger, make plans based on emotion rather than logic and cunning, and make spectacularly stupid decisions. Not Shoshanna and Bridget, thank God. Both these women make their fair share of mistakes, being human beings, but throughout the film they play it cool and measured, dealing with situations that would break most men. One of my favorite scenes involves Shoshanna being forced to go on a “date” with Private Frederick Zoller (a fantastically arrogant Daniel Bruhl), where she not only has to stay cool in the presence of Joseph Goebbels, but must endure the most tense conversation over strudels you’ll ever see with Colonel Lada. The scene ends with her, finally alone, letting out a gasp of relief and horror, and a quick suppression of tears. Powerful stuff.

The “courtship” of Shoshanna by Zoller is pure feminist black comedy. Here is a handsome, confident German “war hero” trying to woo a woman of a country he’s occupying, and she is a Jew, to boot. Every scene with Zoller and Shoshanna just makes you want to tear your hair out, and I mean that in a good way. Yet this isn’t merely the advances of a blundering oaf; Zoller’s crush on Shoshanna has lethal implications. Despite her rejections, Zoller persists in chasing after her, mistaking her horror for coquettishness. Isn’t that the case with so many interactions between men and women? How men often know maybe 5% of what’s really going on with a woman, if that?

Make no mistake; Inglorous Basterds is a nasty, bloody, hyper-charged action flick that will satisfy your craving for machine guns, slit throats, and scalp hunting. There are not one, but two Mission Impossible schemes that end up slamming into each other. And I also marveled at Tarantino’s unabashed affection for old-fashioned projection rooms of the 1940s; these scenes just ooze period authenticity. For those of you who aren’t into subtitles, be forewarned…there’s plenty of them. But Tarantino even makes the mishmash of French, German, English, and even Italian as a player in the plot.

A former manager of mine, who happens to be Jewish, said of the film, ”Just saw Inglorious Basterds. Can’t remember a more cathartic movie-going experience. If only, if only …” and “…towering he-Jews from South Boston beating Nazis to death with baseball bats. What’s not to love?” That’s a pretty accurate assessment. But Inglorious Basterds isn’t just a hilarious Jewish fantasy film; it should also prove cathartic to the ladies out there, if they know how to tune in to Planet Tarantino. Or not. For Tarantino, despite his good intentions, is probably just as oblivious as any other guy.

(Editor’s note: Inglorious Basterds bears almost zero connection to its namesake, Inglorious Bastards, a far inferior 70s flick that I reviewed earlier).

This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse is the sequel to At Midnight I Will Take Your Soul and the second installment of Coffin Joe’s adventures. Coffin Joe survives the events of the last film, and the police are unable to arrest him for the crimes he committed. So he begins again in his search for the perfect woman … one who might be worthy of carrying his son (who is apparently destined to be the future of humanity).

This Night I Possess Your Corpse features Joe’s philosophy, a hodge podge of beliefs that children are sacred, instinct is stronger than rationality, and God and religion are the superstitions of the weak and “inferior” races (who consist of everyone who isn’t Coffin Joe). To decide who shall be his bride, Joe kidnaps a group of women, and then releases tarantulas on them in their sleep. The one who doesn’t wake up screaming but inquisitively pets the spiders gets the job.

The wedding night involves the rest of the girls getting thrown in a pit next to Joe’s bed. The pit is then filled with poisonous snakes. Only things go awry when poor Joe learns one of the women he killed was pregnant, meaning he destroyed a child, “the most precious thing in the world”.

Racked with guilt, Joe begins hallucinating that the woman’s ghost is following him, repeating the phrase “This night I’ll possess your corpse.” In one ten-minute scene, the only one in color (and magnificent Technicolor at that), a corpse walks into his bedroom, drags him by the foot screaming out of his bed, down the stairs, out of the house, through the woods, and into the cemetery, where hands burst from the ground and literally drag him to hell.

Hell is full of color and the tormented versions of all the characters he has meet throughout the film. The Devil (whom Joe repeatedly insists he does not believe in) is a spitting image of himself, a mirror for all the suffering he has caused and refused to accept responsibility for. The film concludes in an atheist in a foxhole conversion scene, which is confounding (not to mention disappointing), but not completely out of place. Joe eventually wakes up and attempts to go about his creation of the master race, but the townspeople get wise and decide to pitchfork and torch his ass.

Though his terrors are largely hallucinatory, Joe continues rambling about “the superior man,” brow beating and hypnotizing people with his uni-brow, stroking his beard with freakishly long fingernails, or distributing the occasional bitch slap to a kidnapped women or village strong man.

Brazilian director Jose Marins’s series of avant-garde, no budget horror films, which he writes, and directs, and stars in, seems to reference no other films. He combines the styles of Ed Wood and Alejandro Jodorowsky, exuding complete confidence in his character. Coffin Joe is as iconic as Freddy, Jason, or Michael Myers.

The trip to hell is worth the price of admission alone. This is the second Marins film I’ve seen, and the first I could honestly recommend. This Night I’ll Possess Your Corpse is a film of irrepressible style that far outshines its obscure b-movie trappings.

After his terminally quirky “romantic comedy” I’m a Cyborg, but That’s OK failed to impress the handful of people who saw it, the notion of Chan-Wook Park returning to the ultra-nihilism of his legendary Vengeance Trilogy would not have been too surprising. With Thirst, he attempts to integrate the offbeat romantic elements of his previous failure with the operatic, pulpy universes of Oldboy and Lady Vengeance. He also integrates a heavy religious angle that leads to Father Sang-hyeon, our man of faith (Song Kang-Ho) traveling to Africa, exposing himself to a nasty virus as part of an experiment to find a vaccine, promptly falling ill (after puking blood into his bamboo recorder), then receiving a blood transfusion which “kills” him before mysteriously resurrecting him. Standard Christ allegory, no doubt, but that’s just the initial thread of this unholy tangled mess of a plot.

Once the priest begins to roam South Korea as “the Bandaged Saint”, gathering a faithful fellowship and performing magic shows at birthday parties (an unexplained detail), he is approached by a hysterical old lady, who beseeches him to come pray for Kang-woo, her cancer-ridden idiot son.

Since Kang-woo’s an old grade school chum, a quick jaunt to the hospital for a sacrament or two is the least Sang-hyeon can do. The last thing this halfway zombified, blister-covered priest wants is to fall head over heels for the fetching young bride of his moronic buddy, but this is precisely what happens after he’s invited to play mahjong with the dysfunctional Ra clan. At first, the comely Tae-joo doesn’t want anything to do with The Bandaged Saint; after a fateful night visit to the coma ward, the priest’s previously suppressed mojo bursts out with a vengeance that would make the villain of Oldboy cringe, then paradoxically salivate. When the man of faith finds that he likes to slurp blood from comatose humans through IV tubes, he’s at first horrified, a bit bummed at the expected aversion to sunlight, yet later delighted to find his eternal yen for exsanguination yields unexpected rewards. Superhuman strength, for one, not to mention the ability to leap great distances or the capacity to withstand severe trauma to the corpus without the usual fatal side effects. Best of all, those disgusting blisters retract, noisily and disgustingly, into a now ever so youthful visage. Which would also lead this Man of God down a path that involves the breaking of many commandments. But first, there’s a certain tile game that must be played on a weekly basis.

Back to the fateful night, that first encounter with his neighbor’s wife, that first planting of the evil seed, that first epic game of mahjong. If I’m a Cyborg was bound together with lengthy, CGI-intensive hallucinations, the weekly mahjong games are the glue that binds the disparate acts of Thirst into a more or less cohesive whole. A few days after the game, there are a couple of weird Meet Cutes in the street before a touching after-hours encounter in the Ra family’s dress shop cements the eternal bond between the Father and the youthful, devious, sadomasochistic Tae-joo. Okay, so it’s a borderline exploitive, lengthy foreplay that’s nothing more than a tease for the eventual unrestrained fuck-fest in an unoccupied hospital gurney, beside a coma patient who’s being harvested for sustenance. There is a sustained tone of dark, cold, icky humor that complements the surprisingly strong eroticism and, later, the gruesome twists and turns that come standard in Park’s milieu of heightened realism. The icy, matter-of-fact detachment from the increasingly ridiculous events gives them a weird sort of validity, but then the disturbingly realistic scenes hit you that much harder. That’s part of what makes Thirst work in fits and starts, and also one of its most glaring flaws. Tonal shizophrenia is an ailment that can’t be cured by mahjong and gorgeous 2.35:1 photography, no matter how gutsy your actors are.

Park reuses a lot of supporting character actors from previous ventures. Shin Ha-kyun, playing the dimwit son with the same conviction he gave the equally unlikable deaf-mute kidnapper in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance becomes an object we despise as much as we pity. He’s clearly a product of his clingy, shrill, ever-attentive mother, the shrewish Lady Ra, who does us the favor of going comatose after a certain point and communicating only in blinks. It is also during this third act contortion where Thirst begins to grow fangs and overcome its initial reluctance to develop much of  a compelling plot, outside of its uninhibited vampiric lust. Song Kang-ho plays his priest close to the chest, as stoic and low-key as possible. He manages to remain noble, even as he’s gulping down coma patient blood stored in a Tupperware tumbler. His particular crisis of faith doesn’t have much of a ring of truth to it. Of course a man of the cloth is gonna throw that cloth away once his disabled church superior whips out a pocketknife, opens up his own wrist, and commands that he drink from the fountain. Sure, he drinks; what self-respecting vampire wouldn’t?

Perhaps he isn’t so self-respecting, becoming more and more withdrawn as he plods (at times, dramatically leaps) down the path of sin, the foul road paved with flesh, leading to an inevitable fiery conclusion. So of course he complies with the girl’s request for vampirization. One good turn deserves another, or in this case leads to several grisly deaths, several gallons of blood and several corpses in the bathtub.

As the alluring, mercurial Tae-joo overcomes her priest-despoiling fetish, discovers her latent bloodlust, then proceeds to manipulate her lover into committing a gruesome murder, her character’s arc is consistently surprising and engaging, if not entirely believable. Kim Ok-vin does a great job with the role, managing to hit all the high notes for a character who is, as written, nothing if not a series of high notes branching off in unexpected directions. One moment she’s coy, giggling and innocently sexy, then in the blink of an eye she’s jamming a pair of podiatric clippers into an innocent man’s throat, gulping down the spurting gore while looking as cold, detached, and downright crazy as Catherine Deneuve at the end of Repulsion. Her character serves quite a few purposes for the screenplay, being an antagonist, a love interest, a hopeful object of salvation/redemption. This doesn’t happen until the third act, which starts with the worst mahjong night ever, involves a long sequence of brutal fisticuffs for control of a car trunk lid, and terminates with one of the most poetic, tragic endings ever.

Thirst is a weird movie that meanders for far too long, goes down a couple of blind alleys, but comes up with a fantastic finish in spite of the difficulty and looks damn good doing it. Seeing Park deconstruct a very well-worn genre is satisfying on a pure surface level; for all its obvious intent, Thirst can’t grasp any deeper meaning long enough to extract anything of use. A subplot about a cult revolving around The Bandaged Saint could have been excised without the story suffering a jot. Same with the hallucinations on Kang-woo’s waterbed. All strange, good stuff, but it’s all fat. Fans of this particular director will find plenty to slurp up, and might even ask for seconds.