Film · 1981 · Films · 1980s
The Killing of America
Scored from 33 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
Assembled from news film, police footage and prison interviews, this 1981 documentary traces the rise of violent crime, mass shootings and political assassination in the United States from the Kennedy killing to the turn of the 1980s. Directed by Sheldon Renan and co-written by Leonard Schrader, it moves through the murders of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy, Charles Whitman's shootings from the University of Texas tower, the Manson case, and face-to-face interviews with convicted killers including Ed Kemper. Chuck Riley's narration threads the material together with statistics on homicide rates and gun ownership. Financed largely out of Japan, it went for decades without a proper American theatrical release.
The Killing of America (1981) is a film IMDb files under the crime and documentary genres. Its country of origin is listed as the United States. It runs 1h 30m.
Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 14 of whom clear the calibration test. 3,140 other films from the 1980s form the cohort it is ranked inside. Only 33 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 33 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track.
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 The Killing of America 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 · 1980s (3,141 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 33.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
