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You guys have inspired me to start reviewing films myself.

http://radiation-scarred-reviews.blogspot.com/2008/12/alien-contamination-1981.html (http://radiation-scarred-reviews.blogspot.com/2008/12/alien-contamination-1981.html)

Good take on the film. This film's gore factor was often a one trick pony which made me believe the special effects crew only knew how to make green eggs and people's chests expolde.

Thank you.  I was a little nervous, I've never reviewed a film before, and this was the first movie on the first disk of a Mill Creek box set I got yesterday, so I wasn't sure what I was getting myself in to.

So I figured a little self-depreciating humor couldn't hurt.

Now let's get to the fun and meaty part...

...the criticisms.


First, though, your writing style is good; you write like you are having fun with this, and that translates well to the reader.

What does not translate well, though, is your ratings.


I still don't know what you thought of the movie other than...


6 out of 15 doesn't jive with 'mediocre', nor does totaling the amount of gore, nudity, and...uh...green slime for a composite rating give any satisfaction to the reader.

Keep in mind that gore, boobs, and...uh...green slime are fine things to rate in a movie, and add a bit of fun to the review, but having some kind of rating that cements what you really thought of the movie would add that much more to it.

I would recommend 'spoilers alert', or some other type of warning, that soon you are about to give away a good bit of the ending of the movie.

Though your outline of the film seems a little choppy...well...you didn't have much more than that in the movie with which to work anyway.

I enjoyed the film more than you did, but I don't find myself disagreeing with you too much either.


I'll rate your review at:
Gore - 0 (didn't see any)
Boobs - 0 (damn...didn't see any either)
Bubbling Green Slime - 0 (was really looking for it too)

Overall score 7-8/10 (really couldn't decide)

Overall you did a pretty good job. :thumbup:

Thank you for the comments, Doctor.  I'll probably be reviewing another film on Monday (the joys of being a college student home on winter break) and I'll try to take your comments into account.  As for the writing style, I tried to keep it close to the tone I take when riffing films with friends -- a blend of sarcasm and understatement. 

The rating system was something I struggled with, and a bit of a concession to being more crass and less erudite in my reviewing.  I don't think it will be coming back in future reviews, at least not in that form. 

I'm also probably going to be less crass, overall.  It doesn't really work for me, and a good friend of mine who also watches B-movies frequently has offered to write guest reviews in which he is more acidic in his criticisms than I am. 

6 out of 15 sounds pretty mediocre to me (assuming the mean of a 15 point scale is 7.5).  But I agree the rating system doesn't work.  Glad to hear Saucerman plans to tinker with it.  Gore/boobs/slime appear to be quantitative factors instead of qualitative ones. Would a movie with buckets upon buckets of low-quality, ineffective gore for gore's sake get a high rating? 

Saucerman, I say play to your strengths.  If you are erudite, be erudite in your reviews.  Just because it's a b-movie doesn't mean you can't be insightful.  Ken Begg does this very well, and manages to be funny at the same time. 

On the other hand, it can be fun to be crass/acidic, even if this isn't your normal personality.  So, if you decide to go that route, I say let it all hang about.  Be rude, crude, bombastic and unflinching.  It can be fun to create a character and have him take the blame for the reviews instead of you; it let's you get out all that antisocial behavior you keep bottled up inside.  This is the route Joe Bob Briggs took very successfully.

Finding your own unique tone/voice/identity, I believe, is ultimately what will make your reviews stand out from the pack.  Easier said than done, obviously, but you have the writing talent to make it happen if you work at it.
 

I'll have to work out a qualitative scale -- I've never been particularly good at rating things on them, but we'll see what I can do. 

A thought that occurred to me as I was driving home last night: I wrote up the B-Movie Drinking Game (http://www.badmovies.org/forum/index.php/topic,119763.0.html).  As a sort of side-bit on each review (similar to Andrew's "Things I learned from this movie") would anybody be interested in seeing how each movie reviewed ranks in terms of drinks taken?

And as for creating an antisocial character to review films acidly, well, that character already exists in the form of my good friend and roommate, Dan, aka "All I remember of THE BRAIN THAT WOULDN'T DIE is how comforting my bottle of whiskey was"

Puzzling out the rating system will take some thought.  I agree with Menard that it's hard for a reader to decide if the film is something you would recommend or only recommend to gore hounds - based on the killer avocados.

I reviewed this years ago under the "Toxic Spawn" VHS release, and the film quality was horrible.  You can hardly see the cyclops.  Now I have the "Contamination" DVD by Blue Underground and can actually see the cyclops.  The monster looks pretty darn cool.

I think I've figured out an acceptable rating system -- I went with a basic 5-stars approach, plus something special for films that can't even rate a single star.

http://radiation-scarred-reviews.blogspot.com/2008/12/on-rating-of-films.html (http://radiation-scarred-reviews.blogspot.com/2008/12/on-rating-of-films.html)

I hink it's a cool idea, so long as its just a sidebar.