Dave and Jim's B-Movie Reviews

This is a memorial for the most significant content that was originally on ratfactor.com: a series of movie reviews by myself and my friend, Jim. The reviews predate the ratfactor.com domain by a year, so 1996.

Here is a list of reviews. This would still have been hand-written HTML at this point. In notepad and FTPd to the server or pico over a telnet connection on dialup.

Styles would have been done with <font> tags and page layout would have involved <table> tags being abused.

We eventually had hundreds of reviews and had survived yearly all-night DBMM (Death by Movie Marathon) blow-outs with arm-loads of VHS tapes from the rental store.

All of this happened early enough in the history of the World Wide Web that our relatively small and amateurish venture in movie reviewing was surprisingly popular.

At our peak, we even had a few small studios send VHS tapes for us to review! It was very gratifying.

Here’s what it looked like around 2002 - at this point, it is running Perl with a plaintext database. There was at least one animated GIF and all rollovers involved swapping images via poorly-written JavaScript.

And here’s much later in 2012. By now it was re-written (at least three times!) in PHP with a new plaintext storage mechanism (it was stored in XML and then JSON before that!).

Bitrot got to some of the content and traffic slowly waned to nearly nothing, so I decided in 2017 (over 20 years after it began!) to put it to rest.

Thanks for all of the visitors over the years.