Gore blimey

After Hostel 2, I thought, 'God, I can never do anything naughtier - how can I upset people and offend people more? Where do I go from here?',' says Eli Roth. 'And there I'm going, 'More swastikas, more swastikas'.' He's talking about his latest directorial effort, Nation's Pride - a short film about Frederick Zoller, described in the film's trailer as 'Germany's most decorated war hero' who is 'bound by duty' and 'baptised in blood'.

That's right: the Massachusetts-born, New York-educated Jewish filmmaker has delivered a film celebrating a Nazi. Not that American cinema's enfant terrible has embraced the anti-Semitic far-right: look closely at the trailer (now available on some film-related websites) and it's not hard to detect a hoax: the voiceover solemnly proclaims Nation's Pride as produced by Joseph Goebbels - the Nazi propaganda minister has been dead for 64 years - and the title credit attributes the directorial reins to Alois von Eichberg, who doesn't exist. The Parisian cinema called Le Gamaar, where Nation's Pride is slated for a premiere, does exist - but only in Quentin Tarantino's latest film, Inglourious Basterds.

Nation's Pride is, in fact, just a plot device in Basterds, a film-within-a-film that provides a converging point for Tarantino's characters: it will be at its red-carpet launch that a band of resistance fighters (led by a bawdy American colonel played by Brad Pitt) and the cinema's operator, a young Jewish woman avenging her family's Nazi killers, unleash separate plots to assassinate Adolf Hitler and his top-ranking henchmen.

'It was so liberating, you would have to leave it to Quentin to summon a Jew to make a Nazi propaganda film,' says Roth, leaning back in laughter in his chair in a suite at the Carlton Hotel in Cannes, where Basterds premiered at the city's annual film festival. 'And the first time we showed it to an audience [in the premiere scene], the 300 [extras] went crazy. Even though they were in character, Quentin was saying, 'Jesus, what have I done? Have I started the Fourth Reich?' And I said, 'If I've reignited the Nazi Party, I'll be their Sarah Palin'.'

Roth says he sees it as a settling of the scores on his ancestors' behalf. 'Seeing the swastika and those uniforms physically repulsed me. But I thought, how great would it be if a Jewish guy makes the most famous Nazi propaganda film of all time? I want to piss off the dead Nazis by being recognised as making a better film than any of them,' he says.

And Roth does play one angry character in the film: he is Donnie Dorowitz, a Boston-born sergeant the Nazis call 'The Bear Jew', a nickname that comes from his determination to wipe out as many members of the Wehrmacht as possible, and in the most gruesome ways. Dorowitz's first act in the film - which involves a baseball bat - can rival any of the things Roth has produced in his own Hostel films.

Inglourious Basterds bears more than an inkling of references to Roth's gothic gore. In one scene, Pitt's Aldo Raine and Roth's Dorowitz are seen interrogating German actor-cum-double-agent Brigitte von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) on a cheap operation table surrounded by surgical tools. To get her to talk, Raine sticks his finger into a wound in her leg - a scene which parallels one of the most horrid images in Roth's debut film, Cabin Fever, in which a young man sinks his hand into the rotten flesh of his zombie ex-friend.