Oscar-winning screenwriter, foot fetishist and shutter-down of butts , Quentin Tarantino has a new movie opening in limited domestic release this weekend, The Hateful Eight . Tarantino has gifted cinema dozens of classic characters in his half century, from Reservoir Dogs through Django Unchained – plus, of course, via movies he wrote, like True Romance and Natural Born Killers. It's easy to forget the wealth of talent that has at some point agreed to be QT's mouthpiece (Pitt! Clooney! Willis! De Niro! Oldman!). The Tarantino universe boasts an unforgettable cast of heroes, villains and everyone in between.

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50. Captain Koons (Christopher Walken) – Pulp Fiction

49. Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) – Inglourious Basterds

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48. Gogo Yubari (Chiaki Kuriyama) – Kill Bill

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47. Floyd (Brad Pitt) – True Romance

46. The Gimp (Stephen Hibbert) – Pulp Fiction

45. Max Cherry (Robert Forster) – Jackie Brown

44. Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger) – Inglourious Basterds

43. Vernita Green (Vivica A Fox) – Kill Bill

42. Pumpkin & Honeybunny (Tim Roth & Amanda Plummer) – Pulp Fiction

41. Clifford Worley (Dennis Hopper) – True Romance

With that, let's look at Tarantino's Top 50 characters (sans the characters from The Hateful Eight -- we'll include them next time!):First we have a quintessential single-serving Tarantino character: one scene, four minutes of dialogue and buckets of charisma. Koons, a decorated Vietnam vet, tells little Butch the story of how he and the young man's father hid a watch up their asses for seven years. It could come off as crude, but Walken sells the scene with laser-beam intensity.Impossibly glamorous with charm to spare, German film star Bridget is actually on the side of the good guys. A double agent working with British intelligence and the Basterds, von Hammersmark escapes with her life from the bloodbath at the La Louisianne tavern, but later dies at the hands of Hans Landa (technically the hands of Tarantino himself).A cartoon character villain in essence, complete with her own unique weapon (a chain whip-cum-rope dart), O-Ren's bodyguard Gogo makes a brief but memorable appearance in Kill Bill. First she disembowels a guy for making a drunken pass – her being 17 and all – then she engages in a scrap with The Bride, losing her life to a chair leg.Permanently stoned and probably fused to his dirt-encrusted sofa, Dick's horizontal roommate in True Romance is none other than mega star Brad Pitt in an early role. He might look like a useless, unkempt waste of space, but... well, he is. But once you're out of earshot, he'll tear you a new one: “Fuckin' condescend me, man... I'll fuckin' kill you, man.”A mystery wrapped in a riddle wrapped in studded tight leather, The Gimp resides in pawn shop owner Maynard's basement – and we're guessing he's not dusting down there. Killed by his own kink, he's hung out to dry when Bruce Willis' Butch wriggles free and cold-cocks him, leaving him hanging by his own leash. We bet he loved every second of it.Frosty cool with an unflappable demeanour, Jackie Brown's bail bondsman is that rare Tarantino creation: a quiet, reserved man who'll use one word where most others use ten. That said, he's still a textbook QT badass, teaming with Pam Grier's drug smuggler for the mother of all double-crosses. Also, he likes big butts.Til Schweiger truly puts the 'glorious' in his Basterd as a defected German sergeant with a penchant for murdering Nazis in the sickest ways possible. Quickly recruited to the Basterds' cause, Stiglitz is most notable for mercifully ending the epic La Louisianne face-off, giving Dieter Hellstrom a killer kiss-off: “Say auf Wiedersehn to your Nazi balls!”One of five assassins on The Bride's hitlist, the woman otherwise known as Copperhead is living a quaint suburban lifestyle when Beatrix Kiddo comes calling for revenge. The domestic scuffle between the two women sets the tone for the two volumes to come: bloody, brutal, backstabby and bitchy: “I should have been motherfucking Black Mamba!”Opening Pulp Fiction with – you guessed it – a lengthy diatribe, this one about the relative safety of robbing banks over liquor stores, petty thieves Pumpkin and Honey Bunny (aka Ringo and Yolanda) eventually kick off the action by pulling out their guns and yelling: “Everybody be cool!” The rest of the movie duly complies.It's not difficult to see where Christian Slater's chancer Clarence gets his big clanging balls: his old man Clifford laughs in the face of death. With gangster Vincenzo Coccotti nursing a bullet with his name on it, Worley Sr at least exits this life with a smile, spending his last minutes on Earth insulting his killer's DNA: “You're part eggplant!”