Generally, the shorter the quote on a movie poster, the more scathing the review, as “this film attempts to be entertaining, but is a spectacular failure on all fronts” becomes “entertaining…spectacular”. But on the Tumblr/Twitter phenomenon known as Awful Reviews, the opposite is true. Awful Reviews removes the pull quotes from movie posters and replaces them with one-star customer reviews from Amazon.com. The results are as loquacious as they are creative, in the sense that 12-year-old boys talking trash on Xbox Live are “creative.”
Some of the movies featured on Awful Reviews are easy targets, like Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa. But there’s also a whole subcategory of one-star reviews from prudish viewers who are appalled by, say, the nudity and drug use in The Wolf Of Wall Street or the swear words in The Goonies. Clerks, being a Kevin Smith movie and all, gets two. But Awful Reviews is at its best when it takes universally acclaimed films like Pulp Fiction and The Good, The Bad And the Ugly, then lets the Internet’s cheap seats have their way with them.