How we score
CrapScore measures the club’s idea of entertaining movie excess, from 0 to 100. A higher score combines more badness with stronger estimated movie-night appeal. A lower score can mean less entertaining material, or a well-made cult film with fewer badness points. Read the breakdown and editorial notes to choose your evening.
Five ways to be gloriously bad
Each administrator scores five dimensions from 0 to 10, in half-point steps. Higher acting, plot, effects and dialogue scores mean more badness or extravagant absurdity. Higher rewatchability means stronger estimated appeal for another movie night.
- Acting
- Wooden, hammy or both at once
- Plot
- How little sense it makes
- Effects
- Unconvincing creatures and visible shortcuts
- Dialogue
- Awkward, wildly earnest or quotably absurd
- Rewatchability
- Would you make friends sit through it?
Where our scores come from
CrapScores are the club’s editorial estimates, informed by film research, published criticism and administrator judgment. Our catalogue entries and movie-night guides include sources for further reading.
We distinguish accidental disasters from deliberate camp and accomplished cult films. Strong performances or convincing effects deserve lower badness scores in those dimensions, even when the premise is wonderfully ridiculous. Rewatchability reflects our editorial estimate of movie-night appeal.
From five scores to one CrapScore
Add the five dimension scores and multiply by two. That gives each administrator’s CrapScore out of 100. Five scores of 7, for example, produce a CrapScore of 70.
When more than one administrator scores a movie, the movie’s CrapScore is their average. We round it to a whole number for display and show how many administrators contributed. The score breakdown and individual verdicts appear on the movie page.
The four tiers
- Crapmaster Classic: 90–100.
- Premium Crap: 70 to below 90.
- Certified Crap: 40 to below 70.
- Flushable Crap: 0 to below 40.
Tiers use the underlying average before display rounding. A score just below a tier boundary can round up on the sticker while keeping its original tier.
How the rankings work
So bad it’s good shows up to 10 published, rated movies, highest average first. The Hall of Shame shows up to 10, lowest average first. Both use the underlying average before display rounding.
Equal averages are ordered by how many administrators scored the movie, most first, then by movie title alphabetically. Rankings change as administrators add or update scores.
What does “not rated yet” mean?
No administrator has given that movie a CrapScore yet. It has no score, rather than a score of zero, and doesn’t appear in either ranking. Nominations, member comments, and watchlist activity do not count as scores.
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