> Well, by that logic if The Mummy or Anaconda shouldn't be there then something like Evil Dead 2 doesn't exactly belong there either. It's badness was largely intentional.

Ah, but neither The Mummy or Anaconda are bad on purpose. They're formulaic on purpose, but not bad. Personally, I think both, particularly The Mummy, are astonishing accomplishments -- hitting exactly the right tone, building exactly the right pulpy atmosphere, and ultimately becoming wonderful entertainments. And yet both are in sort of the guise of bad movies. Actually it's probably the other way around. Bad adventure movies *try* to do what these two succeed at and fail to hit the mark; hence, pop culture becomes programmed to equate ANY attempt to hit that type of mark as bad.

> But I think it's hard to draw the lines easily. I mean, you guys have a reader review for The 5th Element up there, and that's one of my personal favorite movies.

You are absolutely right. It's very hard to draw the lines. In some cases, the choice of movie makes the decision. Sorry, you will never see a IABBBBM reader review of "Gone With the Wind" posted except perhaps on an April 1st. But in most cases, as with The Fifth Element, we let it slide if the review is actually quite literate and not hopelessly flawed or irrational. I liked "The Fifth Element," too, though it's not one of my favorites. I sort of liked "Labyrinth" and wouldn't have written a bad movie review of it myself. But in both cases, and others, these movies, good or bad, are easy and entertaining to poke fun at, and the readers who submitted reviews for them we thought had literate and entertaining reviews -- so we posted them, against our personal feelings about the movie.

My original post *should* have led up to a point I completely forgot to discuss. The majority of the reviews we get for "obviously" terrible movies have been good ones. But with startling regularity, the reviews we get for "Titanic" and "Star Wars: TPM" and "Gone With the Wind" and so forth have consisted of: "This sucks! I can't believe how much money I wasted on this thing! Two hours gone from my life! It sucks! This is the worst movie ever made! It sucks!"

There has been the occasional ok review of an actually good movie we've gotten and had to dump (and others, for more borderline cases, that we've posted anyway), but the only exception I can think of off the top of my head is the forum's own Darien, who has submitted insightful, literate bad movie reviews for "Titanic" and perhaps "The Mummy" (was that it, Darien?), that we've had to reject in spite of how well written they were. (We've posted a bunch more of his, so I don't feel too bad. :-)

Anyway, my original post was to lead up to this curious correlation between the selected movie and the quality of the review.