Genius happens seemingly by accident. Quentin Tarantino, working at a video store, wanted to make this film -- one he got the name for after a customer used it accidentally while meaning to ask for Louis Malle's Au Revoir Les Enfants -- with a bunch of friends for $30,000, before Harvey Keitel read the script, loved it and the film became a full-blown effort, budgeted at about $1.5 million.

At that money, they still couldn't afford wardrobe -- not even black suits for the entire cast -- which is why Steve Buscemi's in black jeans while Michael Madsen's wearing his suit with black cowboy boots.

And these are the boots we pull back from when we see Madsen at his finest, playing the unflappably lunatic Mr Blonde, a man you really don't want to cross. Mr Blonde draws out a straight razor from his left boot and squats to turn on the radio, asking a cop -- thrashes around and taped to a chair -- if he likes a 70s radio station, Blonde's own favourite, which he proceeds to turn on.

As the jockey talks about 'a Dylanesque pop-bubblegum favourite,' Blonde walks over to a bleeding and passed-out Mr Orange, checks if he's passed out, and then back to the cop as Stealer's Wheels Stuck in the middle with you kicks in.

Blonde shuffles to the music, singing along and pirouetting whimsically, the razor still menacingly in his hand. He takes a sudden swipe at the cop prompting him into duct-taped hysteria, before descending pointedly at his face with the blade.

The tape muffles screams and grunts while the camera moves insinuatingly off the scene, as if it's flinching, leaving our imaginations to conjure up the nightmarish slice of gore. Mr Blonde rises, holding a bleeding ear, asking the cop if it was as good for him as it was for himself. He taps the ear playfully, and speaks into it, laughing. 'You hear that?' he almost giggles, before tossing the ear aside -- and so intoxicated are we by the combination of music and Madsen that despite the awful morbidity, we somewhat smirk back. So awesome is the power of Tarantino's film.

Despite a significant amount of blood, Quentin's debut film isn't about gore or violence or even crime: foreshadowing the talented director's career-to-be, Reservoir Dogs is about dialogue. And what glorious dialogue it is.

From a gang of hardboiled tough guys sitting around breakfast discussing the meaning behind a Madonna song, to a traitor preparing a detailed backstory in order to merge into the milieu before he goes undercover, to the dissent shown by people codenamed after lesser colours at a meeting.

Tarantino's writing is savagely hilarious, even when two crooks are facing off in an empty warehouse in a rhetoric-driven showdown. The F-word never quite seemed this versatile before.

An inconceivably smart take on the heist film -- which starts after the heist has gone wrong and talks about how the job was planned, without once taking us to the scene of the crime itself -- Reservoir Dogs is a modest masterpiece that, while never once showboating, establishes a new leader of violence-themed cinema. A man so confident he shoots freakin' noir in the freakin' afternoon. And it turns out cooler than ever.

He's also a man who educates. Here, in one of the film's most frequently quoted scenes, Steve Buscemi's Mr Pink talks about why the act of tipping in restaurants is purely for losers.

It is a compelling, well-articulated argument, but the mere fact that a group of men finishing their pancakes and heading to hold up a jewellery store are even discussing the niceties of tipping is what makes Quentin special.

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