Film · 1997 · Films · 1990s
The Ugly
Scored from 38 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1990s (4,082 peers).
Summary
Simon Cartwright, a serial killer held in a New Zealand psychiatric institution, is granted a fresh evaluation, and Karen Schumaker — a young psychiatrist who wants the case to make her name — arrives to determine whether he is sane. Over one long interview his account keeps fracturing into the past: a violent, humiliating childhood under his mother, the bullying that followed, and the killings themselves, staged in a stylized register in which the blood runs black. Simon is also attended by 'the Ugly,' the silent dead who never leave him, and watched by an orderly whose interest in him is not clinical. Scott Reynolds writes and directs a fragmented psychological horror film.
The Ugly (1997) is a film IMDb files under the drama, horror and thriller genres. It runs 1h 33m. It is rated R. It was made in New Zealand.
Only 38 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 38 reviewers with at least two reviews feeds the raw-average track. 4,081 other films from the 1990s form the cohort it is ranked inside. A second review pool sits behind it as well: 136 Rotten Tomatoes reviewers clear the same calibration test, and Rankquant scores them separately.
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 Ugly 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 38.
Cohort: Films · 1990s
