About SCMS

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Alphabetical Listing of All Movies on File (no duplicates)

Please send file requests, including desired format to the email address found via this link.

Our File

Our file is stored in a Lotus spreadsheet as well as HTML. Directory lists can be available in Word and plain text formats upon request.

SCMS

SCMS is not affiliated with the Southern California Mathematics Society or any other group using the acronym SCMS. Our "counting" of
movies is done in our spare time and most movies are viewed at home (taped from TV or video rental) or in a movie theater. Specific
guidelines (see below) are followed and any questionable count is verified before being updated. This is not a commercial endeavor.

Milestones

These are in three categories. Kills, Movies and Star Ratings. They show what movie was the Nth on file or what movie the N,000th
Kill was in or the N,000th star was given in the rating. Each movie appearing links to the category they come from. The date appears for
those milestones achieved after December 6, 1996.

Star Ratings

The 5 star system is used. Ratings are also verified when 2 members ratings differ. Some Horror movies, for example, might seem
to have a high rating. But the rating is based on the category and compared against other movies in the category. Example: Movie C is
reviewed and is a Miscellaneous Horror movie with a 4.0 star rating. Movie A is a better movie but from a different category and
therefore only received 3.0 stars as that category has a higher standard for star ratings.

In a nutshell, these are our ratings, agree or disagree we stand by them.

Guidelines

There are four ways to register a kill:

• Manual, on screen kill. Actually seeing the character physically kill the victim.
• Hear-say. The evening news reports that the character is responsible for x number of deaths or in a western townsfolk
  taking about the new gun slinger in town and him being wanted for x deaths. Less obvious would be, in the example of a WWII movie,
  a pilot with 6 exploded planes painted on the side of his plane. Here-say can be ambiguous sometimes. We only assume the minimum.
  A couple is 2 "kills", over a hundred is 101 "kills", hundreds is 200 "kills", a platoon would be the number of troops in a platoon
  for that conflict for that army (as different militaries have different platoon sizes; also depends on the time period).
• Indirect.
  • Command - issuing a command to kill or an inferred command to kill.
  • Result of Actions - the characters action results in a death. For example pushing a button that deploys a
    bomb/missle, releasing a virus, setting a trap that results in death or an innocent by-stander is killed during character
    actions (during a car chase a person is struck and killed by a car that swerved to avoid the character). Causing an
    accident can be counted if there is intent to kill (for example Titanic would not qualify because, even though the
    captain was responsible for sinking the ship, there was no intent on his part to kill anyone.).
• Shield method. Using another person, who dies, as a shield to protect yourself. For example, an Enterprise crew
  member goes insane and starts shooting at people. He/she wants to kill Captain Kirk. Kirk is lined up in his/her sights and just as
  he/she fires, Kirk pushes an expendable crew member in the way and the expendable crew member is killed. Kirk can be credited
  with the "kill" or the insane (probably expendable) crew member could be credited. If the insane crew member only killed one
  other character and then was subdued, Kirk would get the "kill" for the shielding as 2 is not enough for the insane crew member
  to make it onto the file (if Kirk had "kills" from other scenes totaling enough to meet the minimum requirement for the category).

Sometimes the super-slo-mo on the VCR comes in handy. War and action / adventure movies are hard to count without looking at some scenes a
few times. Very few movies are counted in a movie theater because of this. No "kill" can be assumed, they must be verifiable using the rules.

Some movies are rejected due to too low of a star rating or too many "kills". If a movie had a character that was responsible for
over a million deaths (1,000,001) then this would be rejected or only the manual (non here-say) "kills" would be counted as it would skew
the file statistcally (see the 10% Rule below). Movies with over 100 "kills" are reviewed carefully to ensure that we're not padding the file.

Minimum Kills

Miscellaneous categories list their minimum kill count on each of their respective pages (usually 4 or 5 kills). Named person
categories (i.e. Mel Gibson) must have 1 kill to qualify.

Run-Time

Movies must be at least 1 hour and 20 minutes to make it on to the file. This allows "made for TV movies" to qualify.

Modifies

Occasionally we will re-view a movie and realize that it should have a different "kill" count and/or star rating. Also we sometimes
will change the category of a movie. In these cases we don't change the "Last Updated" date on the main page to reflect this. Only new
movies will change that date. The Updates page will contain MODIFY: entries and the main page will reflect the
statistical change but, again, the date won't change.

The "Ten Percent" Rule

No movie will be added if the number of kills are greater than 10% of the total file. For example, Darth Vader could go on file for
100,000 to millions for issuing the command to destroy a planet in Star Wars. However this would skew the file so greatly that we
decided not to put movies or counts on file that exceed 10% of the current total kills. Of course we can put a movie on that breaks this
rule if it is agreed by all members.

History

In the early 1980's the file was on a Word processor on my TI 99/4A computer. Commando was the number one movie with 105 "kills".
In the mid-to-late 1980's the file was converted to PC with Lotus for DOS 1.1. Other packages used before the current Lotus for Windows 5
are Access 7, DBase III+ and Lucid 3-D.

It all started back in high school when VCRs were starting to become popular. Video stores opened and we rented. Soon we discovered
late night TV and the many movies shown daily after midnight.

Now, with most of our members married, it's become a hobby. There are very few movies from some categories that we can find (i.e.
Charles Bronson's many movies in the 1950's and 60's). Late night taping and occasional trips to the local video store is about it for
the source of today's updates. The internet has provided a place to publish this repository and we receive email weekly with many varied questions.

We're still unsure how or why we started this but it kept us off the streets in our teen years!

Affiliations

This recent addition allows you to purchase movies through Amazon.com. We try to ensure that the links are current and link to
the correct movie. If Amazon.com adds a movie we don't have please email us and let us know so we can add it.
There are far too many movies on our site that aren't on Amazon to review them all. Active links are reviewed monthly to remove any movies dropped by Amazon.

Many movies titles have more than one release and a lot of titles are listed on Amazon.com but, in some cases, not the movie that is
listed on our file. As this file has been accumulating over the past 20 years or so we can't remember the specific release each movie
listed. The internet movie database contains a more complete listing of titles and helped greatly in
determining the entry on our file to match the correct movie on Amazon.com.

Aug.13/01:
Starting to remove Chapters.ca affiliation. Why? Video and DVD are separate, the site is slow, listings are incomplete (some are just
Name and price, no detail at all) and most of all I've only had 2 orders in 6 months making it not worth my while to maintain the links.

July 2002:
Added Amazon.ca as an affiliate. This more or less replaces the Chapters (Indigo) affiliation for Canadian
content, or at least a place to purchase in Canadian funds without Customs duties etc.. Maintenance on Amazon.ca links are much easier
as the links are identical to the parent Amazon.com except for the affiliate ID and the .com to .ca.
Links will be added over the next few months until all pages have Amazon.ca direct links. We'll be starting with the named person
categories and then going to the Miscellaneous categories as time goes on.

This new affiliation with AllPosters.com brings movie posters to visitors. I'd had a few emails asking for posters so when I heard of
this affiliate program I joined. The links will be reviewed when the page is reviewed on my maintenance schedule.
Links will be added as I have time starting with the named/Actor categories and then, as time permits, the miscellaneous categories.
If you are looking for a poster email us and I'll send you a link or click through one of the AllPosters.com
banners and look for yourself. If you want to become an AllPosters.com affiliate click below (they pay a higher percentage
than most affiliate programs).

Review of Amazon/AllPosters Links - Link Maintenance

Each month, starting with February 2002, dead Amazon/AllPosters links will be cleaned up for the previous month. As long as the link
still works it will be considered valid. Only those links that appear on our Amazon/AllPosters linked report will be modified. This means
that someone must use a bad link for it to appear on the report. We can no longer verify each Amazon/AllPosters link manually as we've
done in the past due to the fact that it is extremely time consuming.

For a copy of our maintenance schedule please follow this link.

What's New / Site enhancements

February 2003 conversion of Sidebar to JavaScript. This reduces the number of screens to display the sidebar and gave us a
little experience with JavaScript. Not all pages were converted at the same time but all were completed within the month of February 2003.

October 2003 addition of "also on" links. This will give instant access to both occurances of a movie. Not all pages were
converted at the same time but all were completed within the month of October 2003.

October 2003 addition of "new window" links. All external (non-SCMS) links will now spawn a new browser window when clicked on.
There are some exceptions (Amazon.com/.ca links in the sidebar and Amazon.com/.ca search boxes). Not all pages were converted at the
same time but all were completed within the month of October 2003.

December 2003 year end page addition. The current updates page is now called Updates 2003.
The current updates page will have all updates removed early in January 2004 to show only current year updates.

December 2003 addition of pop-up glossary / colour change. All headings are now links that will pop-up a small window with a
glossary of terms. Each link will point you at the term you clicked on. Our background colour was also changed so it is one of the safe palette colours.

August 2004 change over to XHTML (Transitional) and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets). This was a learning process as well as a functional change.
It allows greater flexibility in formating and the majority of browsers support it. The style sheets will be tweeked until everything looks fine.

August 2004 SCMS Logos added. To give the site a little colour and to give our organization a logo we created two
logos that will appear throughout the site. One will appear at the top of the sidebar and the other will appear at the top of select pages as well as our main index page.

(Late) March 2005 start adding direct links to movies. Direct links to movies will, from an Updates page or Alphabetical listing page,
take you directly to the movie within the category page instead of just to the category page.
This will be a labour intensive process and will be implemented over the next few months as time permits.
The links will use the movie number. Note: those with a movie number below 1215 were randomly assigned.
Those 1215 and higher are the actual movie number. We only began keeping update records
mid-way through 2001, starting at movie 1,215. (Completed implementation on June 29, 2005)

April 2005 added a Site Map Page. Not much to say about this, it's a site map page.
There is no sidebar on the site map page. Check the sidebar under Other Pages of Interest for a link to our site map.

August 2005 started adding movie reviews. Now movies will have a (Review) link which will pop up a window with an SCMS original review.
This will take a while for full implementation. All newly updated movies from August 2005 will have a review link with them.
We'll start working backwards through our update file but with over 1,300 movies to do it'll be a while! Many corrections will be made but not noted, such as character
name corrections and additions of year qualifiers and a.k.a. (Also Known As) to movie names/titles.

October 2005 changed sidebar to an iframe. The sidebar with all the quick links now no longer requires a 'Go' button click to activate the
link and it's contained in an iframe. The change shouldn't be noticed if you've visited the site before unless you use a video setting below 1024 x 768.

January 2006 year end changes and a new hosting provider. Cleared the Updates page and created an Updates 2005 page.
Added more reviews. We're now up to over 14%! Also we had to get a new hosting provider so the
site might have been down on Jan.18/19. Nothing wrong with the old provider except
they ceased operations last June (2005) and the company who took over for them was too expensive.

January 2007 year end changes and movie review update. I've decided to stop adding movie review to the existing moveis on file.
There are just too many to do and I ran out of steam in the D's. All new movies will have a review though. Cleared the Updates page and created an Updates 2006 page.

January/February 2007 Page Counter changes. The outfit who provided free counters no longer is offering this service.
The new counters will start showing up between Jan.18 and Feb.15. All counters will be converted to the new provider by Feb.15.

March/April 2008 No longer linking to allposters.com. Allposters changed the way their site works and it's too much work to change all my code to link properly.
The links will be dropped page by page hopefully by the end of April.
You can still link to the Allposters.com site to buy posters, just no more direct links to specific posters are on this site.

June 2009 Dropped site on geocities. They are shutting it down soon so there is no point in continuing to update the site on geocities.

January 2010 Dropped counters by A-counter. They stopped displaying the count as a graphic and make you click to go to their site to see the page counter. I didn't see the point so they will be phased out over the next while.

March 2010 Dropped Allposters.com completely. They changed their affiliate program so you have to keep up a certain level of sales in order to get paid. Not worth the effort so I'm removing them from my site.

May 2011 Changed Test site / FreeServers site dropped. I changed ISPs so I have a different test server now. It can be linked from the sidebar. I also dropped FreeServers as a mirror site. They put up too many ads and the site doesn't render well.

Questions or Queries PLEASE ENSURE THAT YOUR "REPLY TO:" ADDRESS IS CORRECT.
ALL MAIL WILL BE REPLIED TO IF THE ADDRESS IS VALID