What do they call a Quarter-pounder in Hong Kong?

No one has a higher opinion of “Pulp Fiction” than I do. No one except for Quentin Tarantino , that is. Maybe it’s because he was once a video-store clerk, and therefore always on the outside yet ever hungry to get in (call it the Kevin Smith syndrome), but Tarantino has always referred to his own work with, well, awe.

The September issue of Cinescape magazine carries a story about Tarantino’s forthcoming film “Kill Bill.” In it, Tarantino addresses the fact that the sequences that make up the “Kill Bill” trailer, which has been playing theaters all over the country, are only from the film’s first half and give no idea about what happens next. “I’m not trying to get high on my own vapors,” Tarantino says, “but people don’t know what they’re going to get into.”

Funny, because people do know what they’re getting into when they watch Tarantino’s first full-length film, 1992’s “Reservoir Dogs” — those people, at least, who have seen Ringo Lam ’s 1987 film “City on Fire.” Just go on The Anti-Tarantino Page and you can see a 12-minute, 1994 short by director Mike White that proves pretty convincingly that Tarantino borrowed heavily from, if not outright ripped off, Lam’s film.

The Web site also has an MTV story that carried the announcement about the New York Underground Film Festival removing White’s film from its lineup. White had titled his film “Who Do You Think You’re Fooling?” The story also quotes Tarantino as saying that he’s “dying to see the original.” OK, it’s possible that he channeled Lam’s script. More likely, though, he was high on his own vapors.