Plan 9 from Outer Forks

I love IMDB. For one, it might be one of the very few non-personalized recommendation systems that actually work. Scores on IMDB correlate very highly with likelihood of me enjoying a movie, especially if I apply a correction for genres that are overrated (like very old and very long movies) or underrated (like zombie flicks). In any case IMDB is vastly more accurate than professional critics' reviews.

The most drastic example of IMDB and pro critics disagreeing was Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, which I absolutely loved! It got an okish 6.5 score from IMDB - which is accurate enough, it's a really nice action-packed movie vaguely following Transformers canon, with as much concern for the plot as a typical action movie (that is not terribly much), and perhaps far higher aircraft carrier to robot ratio than you'd expect from the title.

It was also universally panned by the pro critics getting Rotten Tomatoes metascore of just 20%. Seriously, critics? Is it really one of the worst movies in existence? Have you expected anything else than robots meaninglessly fighting each other and destroying valuable stuff? It's almost as if critics panned Transformers 2 to signal their sophisticated taste, not to provide good service to the audience.

Anyway, back to my point. IMDB not only provides great recommendation service, they also make a lot of the underlying data available in convenient formats. Yes, they charge huge money for some of the data, but even the free portion is very useful.

Some voting patterns are very interesting. Here are two examples. First, one of the "so bad it's good" movies - Troll 2. Normal movies have sort-of Gaussian distribution of votes. OK, not really Gaussian but with a fairly definite single peak. Not so with the "so bad it's good" movies - these tend to have mostly 1s and 10s, with perhaps a few 2s and 3s, but amusingly very rarely many 9s and 8s - it's either very low, or a 10!



The second interesting bit is a demographically polarizing movie like Twilight. People of different ages and genders tend to like pretty much the same movies.

Top 100 for men, and Top 100 for women contain virtually the same movies, just slightly rearranged - neither stereotypically feminine chick flicks nor stereotypically masculine action flicks get into top lists, and movies rarely have very different male and female scores, or much different scores by age group. But exceptions do happen, here's one:



Under-18 men scored it almost 2 points lower than under-18 women! I have a perfectly good explanation for the Twilight ratings effect - normally movies are watched by people who like the genre, so only men who like chick flicks and only women who like action movies watch them. So there will
be very little discernible gender-genre bias. But with Twilight, millions of girlfriends worldwide must have forced their boyfriends to watch Twilight against their wills, to what the aforementioned boyfriends reacted in a passive-aggressive way by downvoting Twilight on IMDB. I don't have any way of
testing this theory, but I watched Twilight on my own free will, and liked it a lot.

Anyway, back to "so bad it's good" movies. I really like the genre, but it's difficult to tell the "so bad it's good" movies from straightforwardly bad movies. So like a good hacker I am, I decided to grab IMDB's database, and find out movies. Here's the list, criteria being - at least 10% of votes are 1s, at least 10% of votes are 10s, ordered by number of votes.

	Votes	10s %	1s %	IMDB score	Title
1	77257	12.6%	11.0%	6.2	The Blair Witch Project
2	69978	24.6%	12.7%	6.1	Twilight
3	68560	30.4%	10.5%	7.6	Fahrenheit 9/11
4	38459	20.0%	19.2%	5.5	Sex and the City
5	33628	15.0%	10.1%	6.0	Halloween
6	24265	31.7%	23.0%	5.1	High School Musical
7	24044	10.6%	10.3%	5.1	The Pink Panther
8	22873	14.9%	12.1%	5.6	House of 1000 Corpses
9	22324	18.6%	27.5%	3.9	Freddy Got Fingered
10	21704	15.3%	12.4%	5.0	White Chicks
11	19898	14.5%	10.7%	7.6	Midnight Express
12	19418	11.0%	26.0%	3.7	Norbit
13	19230	10.6%	43.9%	2.8	Crossroads
14	18410	11.6%	10.3%	6.3	Funny Games U.S.
15	17779	12.2%	10.0%	4.7	Queen of the Damned
16	17606	10.5%	27.9%	3.8	In the Name of the King: A Dungeon Siege Tale
17	17103	25.3%	10.4%	5.7	Kung Pow: Enter the Fist
18	16840	13.6%	54.9%	2.5	You Got Served
19	16743	14.7%	35.0%	2.8	Spice World
20	16706	10.5%	74.0%	1.6	From Justin to Kelly
21	16596	17.2%	10.8%	5.7	Southland Tales
22	16338	16.2%	31.9%	3.6	Plan 9 from Outer Space
23	16191	19.1%	11.8%	5.5	Step Up 2: The Streets
24	16179	15.1%	40.5%	3.8	Get Rich or Die Tryin'
25	15728	22.4%	44.0%	3.7	High School Musical 3: Senior Year
26	15417	12.5%	38.1%	3.4	Little Man
27	15177	15.0%	11.0%	5.6	Alvin and the Chipmunks
28	14938	13.5%	16.0%	3.7	Super Mario Bros.
29	14431	10.8%	14.6%	5.4	Star Wars: The Clone Wars
30	13960	11.0%	10.4%	4.9	DOA: Dead or Alive
31	13812	41.3%	10.2%	8.1	Ikiru
32	13643	23.6%	27.6%	4.5	High School Musical 2
33	13377	35.3%	61.5%	1.3	Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience
34	12764	11.2%	43.2%	3.3	Dragonball Evolution
35	12625	10.5%	62.6%	2.0	Glitter
36	12596	18.3%	26.7%	4.2	Stomp the Yard
37	12560	17.8%	11.3%	6.1	Cannibal Holocaust
38	12554	11.6%	11.2%	4.8	Caligola
39	12382	13.8%	23.6%	3.8	D-War
40	12168	10.7%	12.7%	4.9	An American Haunting
41	12006	13.0%	11.9%	4.4	Stay Alive
42	11770	14.0%	18.4%	3.5	Grease 2
43	11740	20.3%	29.5%	4.1	Postal
44	11554	29.3%	10.4%	8.3	Le salaire de la peur
45	11383	14.9%	13.9%	4.6	Honey
46	11257	12.2%	10.4%	5.0	Just My Luck
47	11150	10.6%	24.7%	3.7	Prom Night
48	11054	11.4%	18.9%	4.5	The Marine
49	10942	11.0%	44.5%	2.4	Kazaam
50	10742	10.9%	77.7%	1.7	Who's Your Caddy?
51	10589	11.7%	16.7%	4.7	Meet Dave
52	10397	19.2%	11.9%	6.1	Sal? o le 120 giornate di Sodoma
53	10378	13.2%	16.6%	3.8	Bio-Dome
54	9774	12.4%	20.6%	4.0	Big Momma's House 2
55	9255	45.0%	10.2%	8.1	La passion de Jeanne d'Arc
56	9234	15.3%	10.9%	5.8	Georgia Rule
57	9145	11.1%	71.9%	1.9	Troll 2
58	9121	13.1%	11.0%	5.1	Strange Wilderness
59	9085	12.2%	16.9%	4.3	Black Christmas
60	8906	12.0%	13.0%	5.3	The Ten
61	8888	17.9%	15.8%	4.7	The Lizzie McGuire Movie
62	8840	12.0%	19.9%	3.3	Universal Soldier: The Return
63	8678	18.4%	45.3%	2.9	Material Girls
64	8654	18.5%	22.8%	3.8	Pok?mon: The First Movie
65	8486	21.4%	12.2%	5.8	Gummo
66	8419	10.1%	17.5%	3.8	On Deadly Ground
67	8378	13.3%	13.4%	5.7	Last Days
68	8210	12.7%	76.4%	1.4	SuperBabies: Baby Geniuses 2
69	8179	20.1%	58.3%	2.9	Hannah Montana: The Movie
70	8103	12.0%	52.7%	3.1	Beverly Hills Chihuahua
71	8045	12.2%	29.0%	3.6	Soul Plane
72	8030	20.3%	13.6%	4.5	Aquamarine
73	8013	41.1%	11.9%	8.1	Idi i smotri
74	7898	14.6%	32.4%	2.7	Hercules in New York
75	7854	23.1%	11.6%	6.4	17 Again
76	7804	20.6%	19.5%	5.2	What the #$*! Do Wenow!?
77	7726	26.4%	10.9%	7.1	The Birth of a Nation
78	7714	13.8%	10.4%	5.0	Annapolis
79	7684	10.7%	23.7%	3.3	Problem Child 2
80	7643	25.6%	15.0%	5.1	Raise Your Voice
81	7605	12.6%	11.2%	5.0	Eight Crazy Nights
82	7588	25.4%	12.4%	8.1	Du rififi chez les hommes
83	7563	11.4%	51.8%	2.7	Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour
84	7499	12.6%	20.3%	4.0	Van Wilder 2: The Rise of Taj
85	7417	14.1%	12.6%	6.2	Gerry
86	7237	12.7%	55.4%	2.7	Larry the Cable Guy: Health Inspector
87	7169	11.7%	10.2%	4.4	Superstar
88	7095	31.4%	10.4%	4.9	Good Burger
89	7093	28.6%	11.3%	8.1	Z
90	7093	11.7%	75.1%	1.7	Crossover
91	7043	44.5%	10.2%	8.0	Les enfants du paradis
92	6930	23.9%	18.3%	3.9	Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Movie
93	6925	23.2%	13.1%	5.8	Pink Flamingos
94	6915	45.5%	16.8%	5.8	Kurtlar vadisi - Irak
95	6766	13.5%	12.9%	4.4	Yours, Mine and Ours
96	6744	10.5%	10.5%	4.2	Cyborg
97	6714	12.9%	40.7%	3.1	Are We Done Yet?
98	6687	20.9%	57.1%	3.7	Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed
99	6586	27.9%	11.6%	8.1	Tengoku to jigoku
100	6555	11.4%	36.8%	3.3	Zoom

Trivia from the list:

• Transformers 2 almost got to the list by having 9.9% 1 votes.
• The most controversial movie in every way is Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience with 35.3% 10s, 61.5% 1s, and only 3.2% everything else. It also has huge 5.0 to 1.3 under-18 gender gap, but as you can see even most teenage females aren't huge fans of it. It's also the worst scored movie on the list, with score of just 1.3, what suggests IMDB's filters think most of the 10s are attempt at ballot stuffing, and get thrown away.
• The highest rated controversial movie is Le salaire de la peur with IMDB score of 8.3 and somehow still more 1s (10.4%) than Transformers 2.
• The highest rated controversial movies that seem popular (by number of votes they received) are Fahrenheit 9/11, and Twilight, both of which I liked, and not because of the "so bad it's good effect", and The Blair Witch Project, which I hated with passion for being so unbelievably boring.
• The lowest scored movie from the list I watched was Troll 2 and I liked it because of the "so bad it's good" effect.
• Celebrity movies are huge on the list, like Crossroads, Glitter, Spice World, Hannah Montana: The Movie, and the aforementioned Jonas Brothers' movie. The only one I watched of them was Crossroads, and I genuinely enjoyed it, in semi-ironic way.