Meet the Guy Bringing ‘Dumb Data’ Movie Math to Reddit

One afternoon this past summer, Mark Hofmeyer was in the backyard of his suburban Atlanta home, doing his best to retrace Leatherface’s steps. This was not out of the ordinary. Hofmeyer, 35, is a film lover who’s spent the last two years writing deeply researched yet thoroughly un-scientific statistical analyses of horror and action flicks, which he posts to his own site, Movies, Films and Flix, as well as to the Reddit movies thread. One such study revealed that films featuring jet-ski sequences average a mere 29 percent rating on Rotten Tomatoes; another measured Matthew McConaughey’s record-breaking, dragon-feeding long-jump in Reign of Fire; and an especially ambitious report analyzed Michael Myers’ Illinois-to-California drive in Halloween H20, which Hofmeyer believes took exactly 43.5 hours, with an average speed of 63.2 miles per hour. (He also noted that the slasher icon would have employed his blinkers 57 times along the way.) “Bravo,” a Reddit commenter once told Hofmeyer, “for dedicating so much time to something so utterly pointless.”

Hofmeyer, a freelance writer who also works for a culinary-event company, doesn’t have any statistics training. He just re-watches certain films and scenes over and over again, and uses a combination of movie-review metrics, research, and best guesses to draw conclusions. In his first major analysis, in 2013, he determined that Jason Statham movies tended to perform better on Rotten Tomatoes if the star wore an overcoat on its poster, as opposed to a suit or cardigan. That report, like many of his findings, just needed a bit of armchair analysis; but occasionally, a bit of fieldwork is required. The Leatherface experiment, for example, came about after he found himself fixated with a scene from the 2003 remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. In the sequence, the blade-waving Leatherface chases a much sprier victim-to-be through a yard crowded with sheet-covered clotheslines, eventually making a last-minute sprint, and lopping off the guy’s leg:

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Hofmeyer was curious as to how a bulky, blade-encumbered serial-murderer was able to catch up with his prey so quickly. (He also had plenty of questions about the endless supply of laundry right near the killer’s house. “[I thought], ‘Is he washing these?,'” Hofmeyer says. “‘There are close to 60 sheets out there, and they all seem dry—who’s taking them in?'”) With the help of a few tape-measures, some sticks, and a hand-drawn chart of each character’s movements, he eventually mounted a brief, bare-bones re-creation of the scene at his own home. He then employed some very loose calculations, leading him to conclude that Leatherface, at his peak speed, could run fast enough to cover 72 feet in a mere five seconds—making him fast enough to handle a six-minute mile. “My wife came home and watered the plants, and was like, ‘Why are there all these sticks in the backyard?'” he says. “But when you’re working on these posts, you need to have some semblance of math. And I have to test it out myself.”

Hofmeyer sometimes presents his findings as “dumb data,” and to be sure, most of his reports would collapse under close scrutiny. But the numbers themselves don’t really matter. The real appeal of his write-ups is the way they combine two major passions of online film-nerds: A deep, affectionate nostalgia for the films of the ’90s and ’00s—even the bad ones—and an increasing fascination with movie metrics. At a time when Rotten Tomatoes verdicts and IMDb scores are vexing studio heads, euthanizing some already-dubious releases, and even being weaponized, Hofmeyer’s quasi-scientific missives almost feel like a goofy rebuke to the idea that the a movie’s quality can somehow be quantified.

Still, he takes his research seriously. In one study, he attempted to figure out how far Stellen Skarsgard’s character traveled through the undersea station in Deep Blue Sea after he was chomped—and then dragged underwater—by a genetically modified super-smart shark. The movie is an especially important one for Hofmeyer, who’s been obsessed with film since childhood. Growing up in Florida, he says, “I was the kid with the Columbia House VHS club membership. I was watching Reservoir Dogs when I was 11 years old, and I skipped school to go buy Fight Club on DVD.” By the late ’90s, he was working at a movie theater, which is where he first encountered Deep Blue Sea. “That Sam Jackson death scene gets all the love,” he says, “But that other one was really gnarly.”

Deep Blue Sea, 1999

AF Archive/Alamy

Yet there are only so many ways to dive back into a cult film like Deep Blue Sea, which has already been GIFed and retroactively praised on the 24-hour nostalgia machine that is the modern web (it’s even been the recipient of some shallow writer’s mindless thinkpiece). For his study, he consulted screen shots of the station’s perimeters, as well as freight-elevator data, eventually determining that poor Stellan traveled about 1.12 miles before he was turned into a human battering ram.

His report likely wouldn’t be approved by a structural engineer, nor would it likely please a fact-checking super-shark. But it does find a new conversational entry points into a beloved movie, at a time when the web could use them. The online movie-chatter ecosystem has been around for more than two decades now—who among us didn’t spend time on AOL’s Star Wars boards in the early ’90s?—and yet so many forum discussions still adhere to the same three talking points: 1) MOVIE NAME was awesome!!! 2) Could someone please explain the ending and/or twist in MOVIE NAME?!!; or 3) Did you ever know this arcane bit of production trivia about MOVIE NAME?!! And the influx of numbers from sites like Rotten Tomatoes, IMDb, and Metacritic haven’t exactly livened up such talks, as they all too often lead to chilly, data-driven conclusions (many of which boil down to “My favorite movie scored higher than your favorite movie—therefore, I win!”)

Hofmeyer’s antic-metrics approach offers an alternative approach—one that proves that by taking a not-so-serious movie as seriously as possible, you can rediscover and reassess it. In the coming weeks, he plans to determine how the amount of actual sawing in the Saw movies affects their respective critical reception. He’s also hoping to determine just how much distance Nicolas Cage covers while wearing his Wicker Man bear costume. “I want people to laugh when they read these,” he says. “Not the biggest laugh, but at least a little chuckle.” And if they let out a little bees-scream, all the better.

More internet movie fandom

• Adam Rogers on the (incredible influence of Rotten Tomatoes)[ http://ift.tt/2fLXX11]
• IMDb voters can tank indies before they have a chance to take off
• Why Mean Girls has been an internet obsession for more than a decade