8 Devious Ways Movie Posters Trick You Into Seeing Terrible Films

2. They Quote Anyone Who Says Something Remotely Positive

When a movie comes adorned with a collection of 4 or 5 stars, before rushing to your nearest multiplex it€'s good practice to see where the reviews actually come from. There is, after all, a certain element of dubiousness that hangs around positive reviews from tabloids; why would The Daily Mail suddenly develop integrity in the Film section? But while this creates an equality between the most esteemed critic and derided hack (everyone's opinion is questioned), at least they€'re all professional critics who have some quantified knowledge in the area and aren€'t just being picked from comments on internet forums.

Except when they are. Bottom-drawer, straight-to-video horror is rife with this sort of thing; The Human Centipede poster mixes in mainstream critics and some basically unheard of websites. It's so prevalent here it's actually been parodied in the most low-brow of ways. For people who thought that Alfred Hitchcock€'s classic The Birds had a few too many shots of real birds, there€'s Birdemic. Boasting all the acting skill and tight narrative you€'d expect from low budget schlock, the film has become somewhat of a cult classic as one of the worst films of all time.

Say what you want about the full feature, but there's no denying its marketing was actually pretty smart (at points). The trailer was fully aware of the low-quality nature of the whole thing, so when it ran its endorsement quotes there was, in amongst Entertainment Weekly and Bloody Disgusting, a pretentious snippet from an IMDb review. Easy to take literally on first viewing, it's a (misplaced) attempt at how reviews from increasingly ridiculous sources get quoted.