Nic,
Thanks for your feedback.
The way Movie-Gurus works is that the critics decide what they want to review, on a first come first served basis. We're not unlike a lot of other online critics sites, in that this isn't anyone's day job. The critics are doing this because they enjoy movies and enjoy writing about them.
Ben is our newest critic, and hasn't had the opportunity to build up his portfolio yet. So any judgement in regards to his average review score is premature. However, one of the reasons that we provide the average score is to allow people to use this information to make a relative judgement about the personal scale that critic employs. I'm pleased that you found the information and noted it. I think to be fair to Ben, and I would say this about any critic, the score has to be viewed in light of the types of films being reviewed. I also want visitors to consider what our scale means, which is one of the reasons we have put criteria to the numbers. Without that, I think everything tends to become either thumbs up or down, or a variance on (crap, average, excellent). As Ben is close to an average of 3 stars, what that says is that he has found most of the films he's reviewed so far to be:
"Average but solid. Fans of this genre will probably enjoy it. Others may not."
I have shared your frustration in regards to certain genre's particularly in the mainstream media. Horror for example, never seems to be appreciated by the mainstream critics. This is one of the ways I think we add value as online critics, in that we're free to champion a genre film, and give it the type of score that mainstream critics would never give it.
With that said, we allow our critics their opinions and publish them as submitted. We currently use the newspaper model, and publish a single review for a film. It seems you are a big fan of both Saws, and feel the review isn't in line with your perspective. One of our goals for the near future is to make it possible for people like yourself to offset our scores with your own, via a visitor's rating, and we also plan to add a forum. Of course the comment facility exists to allow people to agree or disagree, and it should be noted, that our critics are alerted by the system whenever a comment to one of their reviews is posted. They're certainly not expected to respond, but I've found that in many cases they do.
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