A Few Problems


Hi, There are a few problems with American Cannibal. I saw this movie at the Tribeca Film Festival just about 2 months ago. I thought it was a very entertaining movie but had no chance to win any awards and I was correct on that assumption. It did not.

The first problem is that 48 people have voted for this movie and it has a ranking of 8.3. Over 70 percent of the votes are either a 9 or 10 pushing the ranking up.

49 people voting is not out of the question for a film that has played a few festivals but this film has only from what I can tell played 2 festivals with a total of 7 screenings. Let's say in those 7 screenings there were a total of 1400 people. This would mean something like 1 out of every 29 people watching the movie came on here and loved it so much that they had to sign up for an IMDB account (like I just did) and vote!

Second problem I see is that there were 8 User Comments, All VERY VERY positive reviews that seem to be placed there by the filmmakers or close friends. The first 5 comments were all placed about 3 weeks after Tribeca Film Festival ended and all of the users that published comments had never published a review before. In any normal situation reviews and voting would happen within days of the festival screening ending. Instead these people had to let this movie sink in for 3 weeks to write a review.

The last 3 comments have come in the last week and all first time reviews except one of the members decided to review Sideways and give American Cannibal a better review.

Why don't the filmmakers let the film talk for itself instead of trying to rig IMDB to make it look like the movie is a masterpiece, it just isn't.

Alex Hastings

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[deleted]

jesus...

i don't think it was rigged, I think that you are looking into it too much

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It's true. Many films on IMdb are rigged. Just look at "Venice Knights." Nothing new, but from the sound of the documentary (I haven't seen it yet) it would seem sort of hypocritical.

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While all of what you say is certainly possible, you are forgetting a critical aspect regarding the possible number of viewers of this movie, and that is the pirate vote.

By the time a film hits the screen (no matter where) it's guaranteed that it will be available for download within 24 hours if not several weeks before it hits a theatre (yes weeks, and in some cases months). The quality of those copies is likely to be questionable and in some cases unwatchable, but available.

Your guesstimate of possible viewers is quite probably underestimated by a factor of 100 (at least, if not 1000), which would put the viewership closer to around the 150k people area, making the number of voters less than .04% (that's 4% of 1%) which is more than possible.

I agree that it's most certainly an inflated rating, but guess what, it's imdb, the absolutely worst place to look for ratings. The number ALWAYS means nothing.

FB

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