8 Devious Ways Movie Posters Trick You Into Seeing Terrible Films
3. They Quote Out Of Context
You may think that all these crazy methods we've seen come about because there's some sort of rule forbidding distributors from turning derogatory quotes ("this film is not a masterpiece") into overwhelming praise ("a masterpiece"). Well you'd be wrong. Making review writing into a game where critics with integrity have to carefully write an accurate, entertaining appraisal of a film that can't be twisted into something else, there's little regulation on movie advertising. Just like trailers can completely misrepresent a film, a snippet from a scathing review can be reproduced in a positive light.
A great example is that of Trevor Johnson's grubbing of Color Of Night, an erotic thriller which he summarised as "Compelling, awesome, stunning, Bruce Willis' latest crime against cinema is a special kind of bad." You can no doubt see where this is going; the film arrived boasting the quote "compelling, awesome, stunning". An extreme version of the ellipsis seen earlier, this is not just picking choice quotes, but using them completely out of context. Technically the reviewer really did say those words in relation to the film, but at these extremes it raises the ethics of all this tinkering.