Black Snake Moan DVD is a Big Fat Liar

We've seen bad DVD cover art before but this is a new level...

By: Laremy Legel
Published: Wednesday, May 2nd 2007 at 1:50 AM

You've got to love DVD cover quotes. Just like the ones on television or movie posters, they mean absolutely nothing. Plus 95% of them are from Maxim Magazine. If you want a seriously comprehensive breakdown on just how worthless these "recommendations" are take a look at this little article which breaks down who gets quoted, how often, and how silly the quotes are.

That's not why I come to you today however. There's a DVD coming soon with cover art that's so misleading and egregiously bad that it's our duty to point it out (in the hopes that they come up with something better). It's the cover for Black Snake Moan, a movie Brad quite liked, but even he laughed at this nonsense. The disc comes out June 26th and here is the cover art.

The quote on the left is "Two Thumbs Way Up" and there's our first problem. A close inspection shows that one of the thumbs is coming to you from "Guest Critic." Two thumbs way up from Roeper and Guest Critic. Thanks very much guys, I ALWAYS trust an anonymous guest person not important enough to be mentioned. Well, at least you didn't put Ebert's name in there to throw people off. Oh wait, you did, the quote is attributed to "Ebert & Roeper." Good work fellas, not dishonest at all.

I did some research and found out that the critic was Kevin Smith, whom I actually would have mentioned on the box instead. Kevin Smith has fans, and "Two Thumbs Up" from Richard Roper and Kevin Smith would have at least been interesting. It still would have been kind of shady because the font size on "Two Thumbs Way Up" is giant and people essentially associate the thumbs with Ebert, but you'd have had some shred of credibility left.

But it gets worse. If you look at the Ebert and Roper website and head on down to the bottom left to "review archive," you will find an alphabetical listing of all reviews. I would link right into to it but the entire site is helpfully in flash. Nevertheless, if you scroll on down to Black Snake Moan you'll notice there are two sets of reviews for the movie. Crazily, the Kevin Smith one has an "early review" tag with the date the show aired (Feb 16th). The other review, from a guy named Phillips, seems to be the official one, as it's not tagged "early review." The best part is that it actually got a thumbs down there!! Roeper still liked it, but this time Guest Critic wasn't a fan. I think the Phillips guy is Chicago Tribune reviewer Michael Phillips, but I couldn't get the video to load for me to confirm that. It would make logical sense though as they're all Chicago writers, and his review wasn't positive.

So let's recap for the marketing team how beautiful this cover art is. 1. Black Snake Moan was given a thumbs up by an unlisted Kevin Smith for an early review. 2. The movie then received a thumbs down from what seems to be an authentic movie critic. So essentially the DVD cover is misleading and dishonest, with a tiny smidgen of one correct thumb, the Roeper one.

My suggested fix? How about "Roeper Consistently Liked It!" or "Surprise, Surprise, A Director Didn't Bash a Fellow Director!" or "Three Out of Four Thumbs Agree!"

And that's where we're at with DVD cover art. Why even bother with this crap? Just throw Ricci on there in something skimpy and call it good. They say a picture is worth 1500 words (inflation) and that's even more apt when the twelve words you use are utter crap.