Film · 1990 · Films · 1990s
Pump Up the Volume
Scored from 92 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Mark Hunter is a transfer student at Hubert Humphrey High in Paradise Hills, an Arizona subdivision where he can barely speak to anyone. At night he switches on a shortwave transmitter in his parents' basement and becomes 'Happy Harry Hard-On,' an obscene, confiding pirate DJ who spins records and reads out listeners' letters about being expelled, ignored or suicidal. The broadcasts turn into required listening at school, a classmate named Nora sets out to identify him, and the principal and the FCC begin hunting the signal. When one listener's call is followed by a real crisis, the joke stops being a joke. Allan Moyle's teen drama stars Christian Slater.
Pump Up the Volume (1990) is a film IMDb files under the comedy, drama and music genres. The runtime is 105 minutes. Its certificate is R. Its country of origin is listed as the United States.
Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 4,081 1990s films, not against the whole corpus. Only 92 of its IMDb reviewers rate with enough spread for a personal baseline to be measured, so the calibrated figure rests on a thin sample; a broader pool of 96 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 1,098 of whom clear the calibration test.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where Pump Up the Volume lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1990s (4,082 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 92.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
