The following is actually a mail I sent to our digital media people at Home Office, but I thought it would be relevant to post it here:

Just wanted to give you a heads up on something I just noticed on Yahoo! (you probably have already seen it).

When trying to find out if a movie is ok (especially regarding very commercial films which are not critics’ fare) I used to turn to the Yahoo! users’ reviews, but various circumstances coincided to make me notice a film called “Balls of Fury”. The trailer showed it was a really bad film (not one of those “so bad it’s good” films, but an actual bomb), so I was curious about the reviews. I started checking them out and was surprised to see an important number of extraordinary A+ reviews yesterday... and today I find there are also a huge number of users hating the film who have also figured out those “A+” reviews were made by people who also favored other movies from the same studio... which means, of course, that these reviews have been planted. This makes the “audience reviews” credibility disappear.

I guess this teaches us that we cannot try to fool the audience in such a cheap way. It’s different when you see a gimmick that seems real and becomes clever when you figure out it was a scam all along (like the Blair Witch Project or more recently the “Dexter” killer videos you sent, which by the way are so cool!), than when they actually try to openly fool audiences with blatant lies. Guess in the end it just comes down to ethics. By planting reviews, these guys have really damaged what used to be a great tool to measure actual audience reactions.

Anyway, just wanted to share this with you.