Ratings system

I probably should have covered this a long time ago, but as they say "better late than never". I don't know who "they" are, but "they" are around a lot. Before I take off for a nice swim, I thought I would explain how I go about rating the movies I watch. I decided right off that I would use a 5 star system, instead of a 10 star system. With a 10 star system I might give you, the reader, a better idea of how much or how little I liked a movie, but I like to keep things as simple as I can. I hope you all agree that a 5 star system is easy to understand. But just in case, here is what I think each star means:

1 star = hated it.
2 stars = didn't care for it, but didn't outright hate it. Mostly I felt the movie  came close to being good, but just missed.
3 stars = my somewhere in the middle type movie. I didn't love it but didn't hate it either. Usually most of the movie I felt was good, but there were enough things I couldn't really overlook.
4 stars = loved it.
5 stars = I really loved it. More on this one a little later.

I know you have noticed that I don't simply say stars after each rating. I say something else too. Sometimes it's silly but it always has to do with the movie in some way. I thought this was better than just saying stars all the time, and it makes me really think about what to say sometimes. It is more creative in other words.

I don't have any rules as far as the ratings go. There is nothing like this does or doesn't have to happen before I will give it a certain rating. There is one exception to that rule, and that is the 5 star rating. For that rating, I have to love the movie AND it needs to scare me. These are horror movies after all, so they should be scary in some way. There have been some 4 star movies that I was real tempted to give 5 stars to, but I stuck to my rule and didn't do that because they weren't scary. Maybe it would have been to someone else. I really feel the more horror movies a person watches, the harder it gets to scare that person. Plus some things scare you more than it would me and so on. So far I have only given 4 movies a perfect score. I'm not saying that the movie was perfect. I have yet to watch one of those, but it was close enough.

Now back to what I was saying, about certain things happening. I don't have a checklist sitting beside me while watching a horror movie. I go simply by how I feel after watching it. Were there enough good things that I liked to make it one I enjoyed, or enough bad things to drag it down. I know that just because I loved or hated a movie doesn't mean you, the reader, will get the same feelings from the movie. I am trying to give an honest review from a horror movie fan. I know not all my reviews are great, and I'm sure some of them haven't been all that good. But I try to be honest.