Film · 1982 · Films · 1980s
The Plague Dogs
Scored from 82 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
Rowf, a black labrador used in drowning-endurance tests, and Snitter, a fox terrier whose brain has been operated on, break out of an animal research station in England's Lake District and try to survive on the open fells. Starving and unable to hunt, they fall in with a wild fox they call the Tod, who teaches them to raid farms — which brings shepherds and their guns after them. A newspaper claim that the escaped dogs may be carrying bubonic plague turns a local nuisance into a national panic, and the army is called in. Martin Rosen's animated feature adapts Richard Adams's novel, with John Hurt voicing Snitter and James Bolam as the Tod.
The Plague Dogs (1982) is a film IMDb files under the adventure, animation and drama genres. It runs 1h 43m. Its country of origin is listed as the United Kingdom.
Only 82 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 87 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. Its in-cohort standing is measured against the other 3,140 1980s films, not against the whole corpus. Rotten Tomatoes carries a separate audience for the same title, 226 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 The Plague Dogs 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 82.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
