Ancient Web: Haro and Mongoose Reviewed Movies With the Lethargo Scale

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.

Before everybody had a film-rating profile, Haro and Mongoose were busy assembling an alphabetized wall of opinions about movies.

Visit the HARO movie review archive

The archive says most of its reviews begin in mid-1999, with occasional older films added later. It organizes an extraordinary number of titles from A to Z, ranging from Hollywood blockbusters to smaller films that could easily disappear beneath mainstream entertainment coverage.

This is not a professional critic's landing page that has been retroactively arranged to look old. The list is a surviving personal publishing habit. Under A alone it runs through Adaptation, Amélie, American Beauty, and American Psycho; farther down it includes documentary films, international releases, and more than a few titles nobody would call a safe recommendation.

The movie homepage explains the premise: Haro and Mongoose enjoy large mainstream movies, but also make a point of seeing less familiar ones. Readers are invited to email their reactions directly to the reviewers.

Criticism without a decimal point

The best little invention here is the site's Lethargo Movie Scale. It has seven categories, from 'Really Good' down to 'Really Bad', with intermediate verdicts including 'Pretty Good', 'Not Bad', 'Okay', 'Not That Good', and 'Pretty Bad'.

That is a remarkably human rating system. Most people do not come out of a theater thinking the experience was precisely 7.3 units of enjoyment. They say it was pretty good, or it was okay, or that they would like their evening back.

The newer-facing movie landing page still displays a 'Recent Reviews' selection dominated by films from 2007, including Once, The Lives of Others, Transformers, and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. That gives the site a visible time capsule quality even before you enter the full archive.

Not every old link is guaranteed to resolve: during this review, some individual film pages were not retrievable, although the alphabetical directory and the movie landing page remained readable. The review index is the verified surviving object here.

HARO captures a moment when film enthusiasm lived at its own address, with its own eccentric scale, before a platform decided every opinion needed a star average, a social graph, and three prompts to install an app.

Explore the complete alphabetical film index.

Part of the Ancient Web Collection.