What does a 1/10 movie look like?

We live in an age where reviews for almost everything are readily available. The age of the critical review is long gone, we live in the era of the crowd. Rather than going to your trusted source of reviews, we have to rely on an average (Joe) and try our best to read between the lines.

For better or worse, you can find a review of the highest forms of art and if you really need it, a toilet seat cover.

Giving anyone a platform to voice their opinion on, well, just about anything, has led to some comedic misunderstanding of circumstances, creative output, restaurants, holiday homes….to name but a few.

Why is this important I hear you ask?

I’m guessing there is a chance that you, like me, have recently seen Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker. The reviews have been broad, divisive and mixed. If you check out the score on imdb, it currently stands at a respectable 6.9/10 (might have changed by the time you read this, click here to find out). This isn’t a place or time to debate that score.

The interesting thing is in the breakdown of the scores.

The majority of the reviews are 7 & 8, (feel free to click here and see where it stands while you read this) which, regardless of my opinion, I can understand. What I don’t understand is the reviews at 10 and 1 respectively. I don’t want to get into a debate about this movie, but can we all agree it’s not a 10/10? Thanks, let’s move on.

It’s easy to dismiss the 10’s and 1’s with the generalisations of “die hard fanboys” and “butt hurt fanboys”.

Let me share a few special review snipits with you:

At one end:

“Loved it. I refuse to jump on the bandwagon of hating it just to seem cool and trendy.”

“He did it! JJ fixed it!!!”

And at the other:

“George Lucas life’s work lies in ruins”

“Space Balls had more respect for Star Wars than Disney”

“Thanks Jar Jar Abrams”

The strangest thing was reading people slating Disney for ruining a beloved franchise, whilst mentioning Avengers: End Game…I’ll just let that one sink in for a second…yep.

I spent well over an hour reading the 1/10 reviews, absolutely mesmerised by the level of hate directed at a movie. I went through several stages:

1: The “were they watching a different movie?” phase

2: The “why would you take the time to hate on this so much?” phase

3: The “this is worse than the George Lucas ruined my childhood thing” phase

4: The “do these people know what a 1/10 movie actually looks like?” phase

The problem was, I also had no idea what a 1/10 movie actually looks like either!

I’m sure you have looked at the IMDB top 250 at some point. If you have, you have probably questioned the validity of certain movies, wondered why a much beloved movie is way lower than you think it deserves to be…I started to think…

“Wait, if a top movies list exists, surely there is a bottom list as well!”

Thanks to some googling, I discovered a bunch of self curated users worst 100 lists and then I struck gold! Should that be gold? If a pot of gold is at one end of the rainbow, what the hell is at the other end? In this case, I think saying I struck the overflowing septic tank…

The IMDB bottom 250 based entirely on review scores!

I’m sure you are immediately wondering what the worst reviewed movie on imdb is…

Some of you may have already seen it, or it came up in conversations about Christmas movies…

Drum roll…

10 drummers drumming drum roll…

Kirk Cameron’s “Saving Christmas”.

Just in case you didn’t click on that link, this movie’s score sits at a lowly 1.4/10, meaning it rounds down to the magical 1/10 score!

As an act of research, I took 75 minutes out of my Christmas holiday time and watched it (read as subjected myself to this disaster area).

To call this a movie, would be a stretch. It is basically a 55 minute sermon about (to paraphrase the subtitle) “Putting the Christ back into Christmas!” with a pre and post buffer to make it feel like a story. Here is the overview from the IMDB page,

“His annual Christmas party faltering thanks to his cynical brother-in-law, former Growing Pains star Kirk Cameron attempts to save the day by showing him that Jesus Christ remains a crucial component of the over-commercialized holiday..”

The majority of the movie is Kirk Cameron explaining to his on screen brother-in-law, played by writer and director Darren Doane (yes, the same Darren Doane who directed God Money, 42K and music videos for Blink 182, Deftones, Funeral for a Friend, Sick of it All and Slipknot to name a few), why everything at Christmas still relates to Jesus.

Allow me to summarise an example. Christmas lights — Lights — Stars — The Star over the stable in Bethlehem — Jesus.

They pretty much explain every Christmas tradition, with each one leading back to Jesus. Each of these explanations feels like a music video (using some cheesy stock footage), which shouldn’t be surprising considering Doane’s background.

What you end up with rather than a well constructed story, is a sermon, broken into a bunch of smaller sub-sections, that has a character introduction and redemption.

Ultimately, if you took away the beginning and the end, it is easy to picture a preacher in a mega church in the heartland of American repeating the dialogue, with the video playing behind him.

Does this make it a 1/10 movie? I think a lot of the hate directed at this movie is because of its wide reach connected to Cameron’s notoriety and its’ extremely religious content.

From a purely critical point of view, the story is stereotypical, the main body (sermon) of the movie goes on way too long. Who ever worked as the sound recordist should give up their day job…but it is still shot quite well, edited cleanly and if I was a religious person, I might well enjoy it. It is certainly not that much worse than some of the movies churned out by the Hallmark channel. (unsurprisingly I’ve watched a lot of those too in an annual hunt for new Christmas movies)

I guess I’m saying it is probably a 2/10, with potential to feel higher if you are the target audience. Bizarrely the worst rated movie on IMDB scores a respectable (just in this context) 30% audience review on Rotten Tomatoes!

In a bizarre twist, Police Academy 7: Mission to Moscow comes out with a worse score on Rotten Tomatoes.

When I think of some of the worst movies I’ve ever seen, I am leaning towards Police Academy 7 (IMDB — 3.6), Home Alone 5 (IMDB — 3.5), Bloodsport 5 (IMDB — 3) and Going Overboard (IMDB — 1.8).

N.B. I do have a weird obsession for straight to DVD/video/TV sequels, but that is a topic for another day.

But where does that leave us fair reader? Kinda stuck for a 1/10.

I spoke to many of my friends over the Christmas break asking what a 1/10 looks like. What followed were many long conversations about the idea of a 1/10 song/album, painting and pretty much any creative artefact.

The most important idea was a spiralling debate about when does a bad movie become a good bad movie? The Room is an AWFUL movie that has achieved cult status, unlike the Sharknado franchise, which was a self aware disaster area from the start. Lloyd Kaufman and Troma have spent 45 years churning out movies like this to a die hard audience (can I just say, I LOVE Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead). Does something as abstract as Our Robocop Remake succeed at being, at times, so poorly made it is hilarious?

This begs the question: when does a bad movie, become a good bad movie, and why? I don’t think I have an answer to that either.

After a conversation with a friend who is a teacher, exams don’t exist to score 1/10 low anymore. If you are likely to fail a harder exam, you will sit a slightly easier exam with a chance to achieve a lower grade. Can we similarly forgive a movie if we know it is going to be awful from the get go? Making us score it a little more generously?

When it comes to exams, total failure is possible. I would LOVE to know what score Arnold Rimmer got for this attempt at his astronavigation exam:

This would be a stone cold zero.

But had he attempted a few questions, shown some working, and an understanding of the problems but still ultimately got all the questions wrong, would that be the lowest possible score?

Here is my final thought…

We can all jump onto a website and review more or less anything. But what do we score it on and why? Can you separate your emotional response to a piece of art from a purely critical perspective?

I think Baby Shark is a strange form of torture, but its success would prove that it has value to someone. Would I subject myself to watching the recent Cats movie? No chance. I’m sure someone out there enjoyed it.

Does art that succeeds at being the most generic piece ever deserve a poor rating? Is the middle of the road a risky place to be? The 2018 version of Robin Hood springs to mind as an exercise in average. Does Rebecca Black deserve her viral infamy thanks to the banality of “Friday”?

How about trying to do something brave and failing? Is that disappointment too much? This leads me back to Star Wars…

Speaking to an old friend of mine recently about the current trilogy, he described them all as awful. After digging deeper into what he meant, he was just unhappy with the stories and the direction the franchise had taken since the completion of Return of the Jedi. We were still able to agree that in general, great space battles and lightsaber duels are always cool and John Williams will ALWAYS nail a Star Wars score.

Surely that short list is enough to guarantee ANY Star Wars movie deserves more than a 1/10?

Let’s be brutally frank for a second. If you want to know what a 1/10 Star Wars movie would look like? Perhaps you could give a script and a couple of ipads to some under 10s, tell them to remake Last Jedi or Phantom Menace and see what the outcome is.

Wait…we would have to give them at least a 4/10 for effort!

DAM!