Unpopular Opinions

This is a list of works of media where the general consensus is that it is very good or very bad, but for which I disagree. For every piece of media listed here, I have personally consumed the media (i.e. read the book, watched the movie, played the video game, etc.) and have formed my own opinion of it.

My idiosyncracities...

... about the terms "reviewing" and "critiquing"

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I consider "reviewing" and "critiquing" to have distinct meanings, and so I see the "movie reviewers" and "movie critics" (or video game reviewers and video game critics, or book reviewers and book critics, etc.) as having different roles. That said, I acknowledge that many people use the terms almost interchangeably. I also acknowledge that there's often a lot of overlap between the two (a review of a game will often contain a few critiques of it, though I wouldn't expect a critique of a game to contain much review), which would further muddy the water.

The primary difference between the two terms is who the intended audience is. A reviewer of a piece of media is writing primarily to the people who would consume the piece of media; a critic of a piece of media is writing primarily to the author of the work of media, and to any other people who might want to author similar media.

In other words, when you read a review, you would expect some sort of quantitative rating (e.g. "3 out of 5 stars"), and a recommendation on whether or not you should bother consuming the piece of media (e.g. "strongly recommend if you're a fan of scifi"). When you read a critique, you would expect a technical analysis of the piece of media (e.g. "wrapping the primary story in a framing story was a good way to introduce the suspicion of an unreliable narrator to the audience"), what worked and what didn't work (e.g. "the unusually high depth of field was likely an attempt to introduce a sense of unease, but ultimately made it too difficult to control the character"), and recommendations for any future works (e.g. "it would be interesting to see more novels experiment with the 2nd person perspective and what can be done in that medium").

Because critiques often contain technical jargon, there's this sense that critics are "more elite" than reviewers. And so a lot of people who are actually reviewers would prefer to label themselves as critics. Roger Ebert, for example, called himself a "Movie Critic", but he primarily wrote reviews.

As I mentioned above, a review often contains elements of critiques in them. One cynical reason for this is because again, the reviewer wants to sound like a critic because the "critic" label is seen as more prestigious. But more benignly, a review will often contain critiques because the reviewer will often want to justify why they think a piece of media is good or bad, and they will often want to give justifications that are objective rather than subjective in nature. For example, "the scene had bad lighting" sounds like it might just be, like, your opinion, man, unless you can cite the industry consensus on what are known to be good lighting practices and bad lighting practices, in which case you're often dipping into technical jargon.

So just to set the record straight, this page consists of reviews, but like with most reviews, I will slip in the occasional critique here and there.

... about my rating scale

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Many reviewers online use a very skewed rating system. Some video game review sites are notorious for having "8 out of 10" be the worst score they've given out and "9.5 out of 10" be their highest, for example. I think review scores are more useful if they are normally distributed. I'm assuming axiomatically that the quality of the works of media out there is distributed normally, and so it would be "good" if the review scores were also distributed the same way so as to reflect the quality of the work as closely as possible.

Internally, I like to review things in terms of standard deviations, where a score of 0 means an average piece of work, a score of -1 means a somewhat below average piece of work, a score of -2 means a significantly below average piece of work, a score of 1 means a somewhat above average piece of work, and a score of 2 means a significantly above average piece of work. I find that if I just directly report these scores, people misunderstand what it means (for example, they might think a score of 0 means that I think the work is bad). So instead, I translate this score into a 1 to 5 scale, by basically mapping -2 to 1, -1 to 2, 0 to 3, 1 to 4 and 2 to 5. I.e. the score I report on this site is (essentially) their standard deviation plus three.

Works of media that are below or above 2 standard deviations from the mean are rare enough that I can just map them to 1 or 5 respectively to get the message across without too much loss of information.

Based on the analysis performed by a data scientist, IMDB is slightly skewed towards positive, Fandango is strongly skewed towards positive, MetaCritic is pretty normally distributed, and Rotten Tomatoes is uniformly distributed. Since my rating system is normally distributed, I will report scores from MetaCritic when reporting what the general consensus opinion is on a work so that the two rating systems are most easily comparable.

Games

Bioshock. 2007. Consensus: 5/5; My opinion: 2.5/5

I found this game to be pretty mediocre. Not bad per say, but definitely not deserving of the praise it seems to get. The graphics were below average for 2007 (which also had S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: Shadow of Chernobyl, Portal, Half-Life 2: Episode Two, Crysis). The game play was pretty much bog standard except for the "innovation" of the resurrection pods that let you almost instantly get back into the action -- but if anything, I felt like that removed a lot of the tension in the game, and encouraged a play style where you just erode away at the enemies, instead of having to think tactically how to approach each encounter.

I admit that I did not foresee the "twist ending", but I did not find it particularly interesting either. To be fair, not many games tackled the topic before Bioshock. Metal Gear Solid 2 from 2001 did (and was just generally more fun to play). But a couple of games have tackled the topic since and done a better job of it (and were also more fun), such as The Stanley Parable from 2013.

Movies

The Human Centipede (First Sequence). 2009. Consensus: 1.7/5; My opinion: 2.5/5

This movie is a pretty average thriller with body horror elements. It's not clear to me why it got as many bad reviews as it did. My suspicion is that the premise (of sewing people's mouths to other people's anuses) was disturbing enough that many reviews wished to socially punish the movie (or signal that they wish to socially punish the movie) by giving it a significantly lower rating than it deserves.

Note that when discussing the topic of this film, people like to quote Roger Ebert as saying "I am required to award stars to movies I review. This time, I refuse to do it. The star rating system is unsuited to this film. Is the movie good? Is it bad? Does it matter? It is what it is and occupies a world where the stars don't shine." in an attempt to push the narrative that the movie is so bad, Ebert refused to give it a star review, that the movie was beneath even 0 stars. However, I think this is a misrepresentation of Ebert's review, which also contains the following:

And yet within Six [the director of the movie], there stirs the soul of a dark artist. He treats his material with utter seriousness; there's none of the jokey undertone of a classic Hammer horror film like “Scream … and Scream Again” (1970), in which every time the victim awoke, another limb had been amputated. That one starred the all-star trio of Vincent Price, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, and you could see they were having fun. Dieter Laser, who plays Dr. Heiter, takes the role with relentless sincerity. This is his 63rd acting role, but, poor guy, is seemingly the one he was born to play.

[...]

I have long attempted to take a generic approach. In other words, is a film true to its genre and does it deliver what its audiences presumably expect? “The Human Centipede” scores high on this scale. It is depraved and disgusting enough to satisfy the most demanding midnight movie fan. And it's not simply an exploitation film.

The director makes, for example, effective use of the antiseptic interior of Heiter's labyrinthine home. Doors and corridors lead nowhere and anywhere. In a scene where the police come calling, Six wisely has Heiter almost encourage their suspicions. And there is a scene toward the end, as the Human Centipede attempts escape, that's so piteous, it transcends horror and approaches tragedy.

I read this as him largely agreeing with my take: it's delivers exactly what you would want for its genre, and the director and cast did their jobs seriously, with an intent to make this a good movie. It didn't end up being a great movie, but it didn't end up being a bad one either. It's simply an average movie with an unusual premise.

Many of the criticisms of the movie are apt: the pacing of the scenes is pretty meh. The characters are idiotic and don't escape when they have the chance. The writing isn't particularly witty or intelligent. But that's precisely how most thrillers are, which is why this movie deserves an average score, not a low score.

Note that if you're specifically into body horror porn or coprophilia, then this movie will likely disappoint you, because there isn't much of that content there. The person in the front segment says they need to poop, and the person in the middle segment sobs and moans in disgust, but you don't actually see anything happen. It's all left your imagination. It certainly did not come off as a sexploitation film, nor a pornographic one. The sewn-together characters are topless (they wore some sort of boxer-short/briefs hybrid to cover their bottoms), but the camera angles were such that there was never a nipple visible. If you ignore the context and just consider what body parts were visible, this could easily have been a PG13 film.

The Human Centipede 2 (Full Sequence). 2011. Consensus: 1/5; My opinion: 4/5

I actually found this movie to be pretty good for its genre. Human Centipede 1 was a slightly below average horror movie: It had average writing (which is to say "bad" writing relative to a "good" movie), average acting (i.e. "bad" relative to "good"), weird pacing, and so on. HC2 fixes almost all of these issues. The writing and acting both significantly improved.

Writing wise, they went with a much stronger "show, don't tell" approach: In HC1, you know the world famous surgeon is a world famous surgeon, because he says "I'm a world famous surgeon; In HC2, you know the mentally unstable guy is a mentally unstable guy 'cause of his vacant stare, his "out-of-nowhere" giggles to himself, and how he jerks off while watching Human Centipede 1.

Acting wise, Laurence R. Harvey as the mentally unstable guy is absolutely brilliant. So much so that I was genuinely shocked when I later saw Harvey in a different movie where he played a neurotypical, bubbly, cheerful and sweet guy. The one place where I felt his character falter were the scenes where he'd cry when his experiments died. It just came off as very odd. And it wasn't the "good" sort of odd where it makes you feel unease at watching a mentally unstable guy. It was more like the movie wanted to communicate to the audience that the guy was said, and the best way they could figure out how to do that was to just have him cry all of a sudden. It's unclear how much of the problem laid with the writer's inability to "show" more effectively, versus the actor's inability to make the scene-as-written work.

That said, a lot of the supporting casts' performance was disappointing in contrast. I suspect they would have been fine in a movie like Human Centipede 1, where the lead was also "a little below average", but they really stood out (in a bad way) compared to Harvey's performance. The mother's performance was fine (as in, average) and played very by-the-numbers. The writing probably did not give her many ways to shine, except perhaps for the scene where she slits her own wrists in despondency. I felt like that could have been a moment for the actress to really shine, but it too was just delivered in an average fashion. The upstairs neighbor was a little over the top, and falls into the "slightly below average" level. With some better writing/editing/directing, this could have been papered over (maybe that's not how the upstairs neighbor really is? maybe that's just how he appears from the eyes of the mentally disturbed guy?) but as it was, it just came off as a little cartoonish -- which again, is not wholly unexpected for a horror movie, but it really becomes noticeable when contrasted against Harvey's superb performance.

Plus the cinematography in HC2 is just on a totally different level from HC1. There's a definite Hitchcock vibe going on in HC2, and the use of black and white footage makes me suspect this was fully intentional. HC1 felt like they wanted the actors to do a specific think, and so they just pointed the camera at where the actors would be doing it, filmed the actors doing the thing, and called it a day. In HC2, it felt like considerable thought was put into what angle and distance to place the camera from the action, in order to generate specific emotional experiences in the viewer. They also made excellent choices in exactly what actions to show and what actions to have occur slightly off camera, in order to maximize that dreadful "Oh god, they're not gonna show what I think they're gonna show, are they?" tension. And that tension is crucial for a good body-horror film. My main criticism here is that the frequent flickering lights in the warehouse was overused and started to feel like a transparent attempt to mask any problems they couldn't otherwise workaround.

So if HC2 is better than HC1 (itself a pretty average movie) in almost every way possible, how is it that the general consensus not only rates HC2 below HC1, but rates HC2 as a very poor movie (1 out of 5 stars) altogether?

As I mentioned in HC1, I suspected that the generally negative reception it received was mostly due to social signalling. I think largely the same thing is happening here. HC2 is much more graphic than HC1. For one, you actually do see nipples in HC2 (as well as a penis, and several buttocks but I don't think you ever directly see a vulva nor an anus). Secondly, you see significant violence, including a scene where a person gets their head bashed in with a crowbar. That said, I do not think what HC2 shows is "over the top" for a body horror movie. I think it's very comparable to the Resident Evil 7 video game, for example, which has received mainstream appeal (9+ million copies sold, 4.5/5 stars, etc.)

So yes, HC2 is very graphic, but it is not significantly more graphic for a work of media in the body horror genre. It seems odd to give a body horror movie a low rating because it presents human bodies in a gross/obscene way, in the same way that it would seem odd to me for a critic to give a comedy move a low rating for containing humor, or an action movie a low rating for containing explosions or gun fights.

To support my thesis that the consensus rating is more due to social signaling than due to the quality of the movie itself, I'm going to quote a couple of reviews of the movie, and point out why I do not think they are actually about the movie itself.

Not only is the movie ingenious, but it also shows us just how big Six’s balls are. Centipede 2 is literally a big “f*ck you” to critics of the first Sequence [...] Six’s flick is an over-the-top and in-your-face splatterfest that spends an hour and half making one bold statement: Centipede 2 isn’t real life; it’s just a movie. Six is screaming at the top of his lungs that everyone is taking his sh*t way too seriously. It’s simple art and nothing more. Stop over analyzing it. [...] Look, I completely understand everyone’s hatred for Human Centipede 2. It’s an extremely malicious film where Six spends the duration proving his point instead of telling an engaging story. But to his point, who gives a sh*t? It’s art, it’s his movie and it’s his statement; at least he’s actually saying something. He doesn’t have to make a movie FOR you, nor does he owe it to anybody to do so. [...] Human Centipede 2 is a brilliant response to critics of his first film. It makes a strong statement that it’s just a movie and that people take his work way too seriously,

Brad Miska, ‘The Human Centipede Part 2 (Full Sequence)’ a Hysterical Potshot at Critics!

This comes off as a lot of "us vs them" social signalling. It sounds like this reviewer would not really care what the quality of the movie ended up being, as long as he perceives HC2 as attacking the critics of the HC1.

[A character] is met by the singularly disquieting Martin (Laurence R. Harvey), a pudgy, near-sighted, pear-headed, clammy-skinned, mentally disabled momma's boy who works as a security guard in a mostly-deserted subterranean parking garage. Since Martin very rarely ever says anything in this movie, how, you may ask, have I made my diagnosis of his mental condition? I submit to you that if this man spends his waking moments looking at the first Human Centipede movie over and over and over again, and wants to make his own version by connecting as many as 12 people, he is four tires short of a car.

Laurence R. Harvey is described as "a British performance artist." I raced off to the always helpful Google and discovered that his artistic career to date hasn't generated a single link. It may be that his performance art consists entirely of walking down the street as himself. Gene Siskel liked to amuse himself by people-watching and thinking, "When that person looked in the mirror before leaving the house, he thought he looked great."

[...]

The film is reprehensible, dismaying, ugly, artless and an affront to any notion, however remote, of human decency. It makes a point of Martin's lack of all surgical skills. He seems to have sewn his victims together with summer camp skills where you stitch the parts of a billfold together with leather thread. I am left with this question: After Ashlynn Yennie's first movie role was in the first "Human Centipede" movie, and now her second is in "Human Centipede Two," do you think she'll leave show business?

Roger Ebert, An ugly, artless affront to human decency

Ebert notes that he's able to understand Harvey's character, despite the fact that he does not utter a single line in the whole movie. I feel like that just reinforces my point about good writing and good acting, but Ebert seems to spin this as a negative. Ebert seems to focus his review on:

Implying an insult for people who liked the first movie ("if this man spends his waking moments looking at the first Human Centipede movie over and over and over again")
Harvey's credentials ("I raced off to the always helpful Google and discovered that his artistic career to date hasn't generated a single link)
Harvey's physical appearances ("When that person looked in the mirror before leaving the house, he thought he looked great.")
Wistfully imagining that the people involved have their careers ruined ("do you think she'll leave show business?")