NO FILM arrives with more advance hype than Pulp Fiction. The winner at Cannes, it was the opener of the New York Film Festival, where its writer-director, Quentin Tarantino, began his presentation by thanking Janet Maslin for her dithyrambic review in the New York Times, now being reprinted as half of a two-page ad. Mr. Tarantino made his directorial debut with the mean and nasty Reservoir Dogs, and has provided similarly sniggering-sadistic screenplays for other directors.
The haute audience at the Lincoln Center gala premiere laughed, applauded, and cheered like a bunch of Saturday-night rowdies attending the latest horror film. During the most troubling scene, when a woman who has OD’d has to be given a hypodermic straight to the heart with a wallop sufficient to penetrate the chest cavity (is this good medicine?), someone in the audience passed out, there were calls for a doctor, and, in the near-panic, the film had to be stopped, only to resume with an encore of the injection scene, making the premiere that much more prestigious and memorable.
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