I've lost faith in IMDB user ratings

I have COMPLETELY lost faith in the IMDB voting system because of this movie. Only a few days ago this movie was rated at 7.3/10 after 30 votes. Now it is showing 7.7/10 after 32 votes. I was voter number 31 and definitely voted 1 for it. If I add up all the votes for all the ratings, I get 191. Dividing it by 10 gives me 5.96875 (OK we can round that up to 6.0 I guess.) 6.0 would explain the movie better, as obviously it may appeal to some people, but it will quite likely not appeal to a whole lot more people. Heck, if only a couple more people vote 10 it could get a 7.9, which would put it in the Top 250 List, ABOVE movies like Pirates of the Carribean!

With this type of 'cult' movie, it is likely that the only sort of person who would watch it in the first place would pretty much expect the movie to be pretty bad, therefore it may score higher with the sort of people it is designed to impress, but when a movie has received so many '1' votes yet still ranks highly due to weighted voting, it discredits the entire system. Maybe if I change my vote to a '2' it will change the weighting and drop the vote, who knows.

Just picking a few movies at random here: how can this movie rate lower than Under Seige which is rated as 6.1 after 11,977 votes? It is a movie that even my Mum and Dad liked. They show it on TV at least twice a year, always at prime time. It is a popular, enjoyable movie. Good cast, good music, great action, good plot.

Rectuma is currently ranking higher than Star Wars Episode II, which is rated 6.9. Sure, it wasn't the best of the Star Wars movies, but I can GUARANTEE that it is much better than Rectuma. Nobody in their right mind would say that Rectuma is a better movie than Star Wars Episode II. Yet that is what IMDB implies.

I watched 'Shanghai Surprise' the other day on Cable, and it ranks 2.1. Yet it was actually a slightly entertaining movie that was bearable to sit through. I can imagine my Mum actually watching it and enjoying it. I can think of a whole bunch of movies that are FAR FAR worse yet they are not listed in the IMDB Bottom 100. Heck, if this movie was actually that bad why would they play it twice a week on cable (it's been playing for months now and obviously nobody is complaining.)

Eddie Murphy's 'The Haunted Mansion' was a pretty boring movie, but it had a couple of laughs in it. It scores a low 4.9. I'll bet a whole bunch of kids may find it amusing though. They would certainly enjoy it more than 'Rectuma.'

The weighted voting system simply doesn't work.

It seems that a movie's popularity guarantees it a lower user rating than it deserves. The more people who vote, the more people are likely to give it a low rating. Yet crap movies that nobody should ever watch are given high ratings by a small number of people, and hang on to their high ratings even if other users give them low ratings, due to the weighted rankings.

I assume the entire idea of having a User Rating system is to show people what movies are good so they can also go and see them, or to stop people from watching rubbish movies. If I can't rely on it as a rough guide to how good or bad a movie is, what is the point at all?