The Carry Slee movies have been around for about ten years and have been shown consistently in our household, re-watching them several times with my daughter. When she asked if she could go to the next Carry Slee movie (the eighth in the series) we checked out when and where she could see it. She wanted to check out one of the actors so we went to his IMDb page and ended up here. I saw that the rating was a good 7.8. That sounded promising! I checked out the statistics and saw there were 133 10's all coming from the United States. The movie wasn't showing yet, let alone in the US! We left the computer on during dinner and when we came back, the rating bumped up to 8.8, with now 263 10's. It was the day before the movie came out, so I thought maybe fans flooded the movie with good ratings. But then I remembered, they are all US votes! And judging by the statistics, they were all women. So within an hour the page was flooded with fake votes.
I was intrigued now, so the next day I checked again (this was the official opening day). And again the page was flooded and had 397 10's. This time there were less coming from the US, but the US users statistic was still 100% 10's. It turned out that only around 2800 people saw the movie by that time.
I kept checking and on Friday on the first opening weekend, there were the fake votes again. This time 134 8's were added and the IMDb rating went down to 8.3. At first I still thought maybe fanboys flooded the page with these fake votes, but now that there were more added on the official opening weekend, I started to think there was an artificial intervention by the makers of this movie. Well, that's a terrifying thought! It looked as if they tried to cover up all the 10's.
I kept a close eye on the numbers, but it seemed they stopped the flooding and normal voting commenced. By the time of writing this its rating is a 7.8. The fraudulent US users votes gave it a 9.8 and the partially fraudulent non-US users gave it a 5.5, which seemed a lot more reasonable, with most votes gearing toward the 1-4 range. You hear about these practices happening with Hollywood movies, but I never heard it happening in the Netherlands. Let alone seeing it happen with my own eyes.
IMDb recommends other movies that the same users voted on and as you can see they are all titles from other countries and all of them seem to have a suspicious rating. They probably all bought fake votes from the same company.
As for the movie, me and my daughter didn't like it at all. It strayed too far from the book and what they kept in didn't make much sense. It tries to teach children moral lessons, but in a way they did in the 90's. Some things don't even belong in a movie anymore in 2016, like the heroic boy who needs to save his damsel in distress. Please keep up with the youth of the current day. And visit an actual high school for research when you make a movie like this, as how it is portrayed here is completely outdated.
This movie performed terrible at the box office, making it the first Carry Slee movie that completely bombed, making only a small fraction of its budget back. I would be surprised if they ever made a next one. Should they make a next movie, they should really consider hiring a different writer and director who can put a fresh and young spin on this old fashioned series. I can imagine there are a lot of young, talented directors out there who could pull this off. And just accept it when you've made a terrible movie, don't buy fake IMDb votes to make it seem like you made a good one. Or maybe the voting is correct and hundreds of women came from the US to the Netherlands to catch and early screening before the release date and gave it a solid 10 out of 10 stars when they were back home.
Either way, if you are a fan of the book, there is nothing to see here. Too much has been changed. The movie itself is a formulaic mess and doesn't bring anything new to the table. If you really want to see it, do it, but don't be lured in by the high, fraudulent IMDb rating.
