Ratings

A breakdown of the Malchats' Reel Reviews ratings system:

PURR is the Malchats version of a positive review. Movies marked with a PURR range from Good to to Great to Must See status. Watch a PURR film for a quality viewing experience--one that's worth it even if you have to pay for it. The best of the best movies get not just a PURR but are included in that hall of fame I like to call "Best of All."	MEOW is reserved for a movie that lives somewhere below a "Wow!" and just above a "Meh." It's not a bad film, just not an especially great one. A MEOW film has its moments, at the least, and is probably worth seeing if it features one of your favorite actors or directors or writers, etc.). Just be sure not to pay to see it; get the DVD from the library, or watch it on TV if it pops up on your preferred subscription channel/service.	HISS is a bad movie. It's pretty rare that a movie gets a HISS here at Malchats' Reel Reviews--there's a bias towards watching movies that are competently made--but every so often one slips through the defenses...and then out come the claws! Avoid any movie marked with a HISS like it has fleas.

Explanation

Given the site's cat theme, the ratings PURR and HISS are pretty obvious and self-explanatory.

MEOW requires a bit of explanation. The goal here is to keep it simple. There's a positive review (PURR), a negative review (HISS)...and then there's a middle ground--a label intended for a movie that's not great nor awful; a movie that's probably worth seeing, though maybe you don't want to go out of your way to see it (certainly, you don't want to pay to see it); a movie that lives somewhere between "Wow!" and "Meh."

It took me a while to figure out what should be the label for such a movie. Eventually, after much consideration, I concluded that some combination of "Wow!" and "Meh" would be most appropriate for these middle-ground movies. I took a piece of each response and had my label:

WOME

Wait. No, that wasn't quite right. It didn't strike the right tone, and of course it didn't make a lick of sense either. Perhaps if I flopped around the terms and created the portmanteau from the other halves of the words...

MEOW

Yeah, that made a lot more sense--and naturally worked better with the overall cat theme, too. It should have been obvious from the start, I suppose, but that's not how the world always works.

So there you have it: that's my supposed to be clever, but isn't really all that much ratings system. At least it has the virtue of being direct and to the point.