The Movie Review Format
Idris Hsi, February 22, 2000
Introduction
You can learn a lot about people by taking them to a bad movie. To
the boring, humorless, conservative, stick-in-the-mud types a bad movie
represents wasted money, wasted time, bad taste, and a bad evening.
These are the kind of people who dwell on every adversity and look at every
glass as half empty. Dull. Blah. I used to be one of
those people. Then I saw Starship
Troopers. Prior to this, I'd seen Batman
and Robin, Lost World,
Independence
Day, Mission Impossible,
and whole slews of crap. Each time, I'd leave thinking
about all the things I could be buying if I had simply stayed away.
Starship Troopers was a movie that my friends and I knew would be bad.
If Hollywood does anything well, it's throw a lot of money at badly-written
blockbusters. But we were die-hard Robert Heinlein fans so off we
went in a large group. The movie was bad. It was so bad it
was funny. And it was so funny that everyone in the theater realized
it. And then we started laughing and heckling the movie and the rest
of the theater joined in. We laughed at the dialogue. We laughed
at the action segments. We laughed when the love interest died.
We laughed when Doogie Howser saved the day. What a great movie.
Now we go to bad movies on purpose and we write reviews because it's fun.
I think going to bad movies prepares you for life. It teaches
you how to survive adversity with humor, satirical wit, and penetrating
observation.
The Review
The review gives our impressions of the movie and, if possible, only the
briefest of plot summaries. We hate reading reviews from other people
that give away the entire movie and especially those little spoilers that
would have made the movie vaguely suspenseful or surprising. We promise
not to do that here with one exception: If the movie is unforgivably bad,
we will blab as much as possible to explain fully why we thought it was
bad, what made it worse, and why you should either avoid the movie or see
it to revel in its badness. Otherwise, we talk about the technical
merits of the film in the broadest of strokes - quality of the acting,
the believability of the special effects, and, if there is one, the depth
of the story.
The Drive-In Totals
The drive-in totals are inspired by Joe
Bob Briggs of TNT's MonsterVision!
They're a list of things to look for if you haven't seen the movie or
they're things to reminisce about as you read this review. If you
think about them too much, they have the potential to spoil the movie but,
in general, the list has teasers and riddles - not spoilers.
The Good Movie Scale
The good movie scale is pretty straightforward. A 10 is a good movie.
A 1 is a horrible movie. We've had some disputes in the past about
what these numbers really mean. In general, you can assume that the
good movie scale reflects how much we enjoyed the movie, independent of
the points that we heckle in the Bad Movie Scale.
The Bad Movie Scale
The Bad Movie Scale takes a little explaining.
A 10 means the movie was horrible but had enough badly-written substance
to be hysterically funny. The acting, the dialogue, the special effects,
and the brilliant plot twists leave many possibilities for one-liner heckling
from the obnoxious theater viewer. A 10 means that you felt your
money was well spent and you take some time talking your unsuspecting friends
and co-workers into watching this epic. Has cult-potential.
A 5 or 6 is a movie that wasn't bad enough to be funny. Most movies
tend to be mediocre like that.
A 0 or 1 means simply that the movie simply wasn't funny in the bad
sense.
Interpreting the Combined Scales
Basically, we provide both scales to give both types of movie watchers
some guidance. If you're in the mood for a ridiculously bad movie,
you don't get Casablanca
(a 10 / 0), you go get Attack
of the Killer Tomatoes (2/8) or Orca
(3/7). The movies to stay away from are those that have low numbers
in both scales.A 1/1 means the movie was horribly bad. You find yourself alternating
between checking your watch and keeping both hands on your skull to keep
it from exploding. Nothing is redeeming about the movie; not even
the credits. At the end of the movie, the audience stampedes for
the doors. You've seen better dialogue from Charlie Chaplin, better
special effects from Plan 9, better action scenes from America's Funniest
Home Videos, and if there was a plot, well, it came out of a Cracker Jack
comic strip. If people were still brave enough to express anger,
and this were pre-1940's, the audience would be demanding its money back
from the theater (does anyone do that anymore?).
We don't know if a 10/10 exists but it might be The
Wizard of Oz or possibly The
Sound of Music.
Some examples of the Bad Movie Scale:
Starship Troopers: 10
Prince Valiant : 10
Mars Attacks : 9
Average Hong Kong Martial Arts Flick : 9
Average Japanese Monster Movie : 8
Robin Hood-Prince of Thieves:
8
The Man in the Iron Mask
(1998): 6
Batman Forever : 5
Waterworld : 4
Batman and Robin : 3
Lost World : 3 - especially
for the Gymkata moment.
Mortal Kombat II : 2
Showgirls : 1 - Probably
one of the worst movies of all time.
