About Us

Welcome to Movies Schmovies, the location of a new & unique idea in movie-reviewing. We provide weekly reviews from Mervius and Kevin Farley, in the form of full-text reviews. But we also have a weekly comic strip, where we give you the scoop - condensing the basics of both of our reviews - in the form of a dialogue. We hope it's an entertaining combo.

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One of our reviewers is Mervius (real name: John Murray), formerly of Fantastica Daily (the science fiction/fantasy/horror site that operated from September 1998 to January 2006). Mervius loves movies. Some of you may have heard him talking about movies live on the air in Pittsburgh, on B-94 (93.7 FM), with morning team John-Dave-Bubba-Shelley and “Jill Doin’ the Movies,” Friday mornings, November 1999 to September 2000. Mervius was a member of the Online Film Critics Society, 2001 to 2005. He was also an Approved Tomatometer Critic at Rotten Tomatoes until he retired from the reviewing game in 2005. Now, after a 2½-year break, he has returned from retirement, lured back by the exciting idea we’ve come up with here at Movies Schmovies.

Some of Mervius’s favorite movies: Titanic, Forrest Gump, American Beauty, Fight Club, Braveheart, It’s a Wonderful Life, Vanilla Sky, My Dog Skip, The Lord of the Rings, Memento, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, The Matrix, Excalibur, Blade Runner, Pulp Fiction, Interview with the Vampire, Batman Begins, Donnie Darko, The Sixth Sense, The Fisher King, Die Hard, Speed, The Dead Zone, The Butterfly Effect, Raiders of the Lost Ark, GoodFellas, The Abyss, Aliens, Lawrence of Arabia, Casablanca, Vertigo…

Contact Mervius at mervius@movies-schmovies.com.

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Our other regular reviewer is Kevin. Kevin Farley graduated from the University of Pittsburgh in December of 2006 with a Bachelor’s of Arts in Film Studies and a Concentration in English Writing. He has a decent amount of experience in production, but most of Kevin’s work in the film area has been in the writing niche – he’s written two feature-length screenplays (one of which is going into production in 2008, here in the ‘Burgh) and is currently hacking away at his third.

While Kevin is a relative newcomer to the reviewing game, his outspoken, opinionated, moderately articulate nature lends itself well to reviewing movies, and under the careful tutelage of Mervius, he’s coming along quite well. He loves movies (obsessed since the first time he saw Raiders of the Lost Ark at age 5), and he’s glad that he was able to lure Mervius (longtime hero of his since his days of listening to B-94 back in Middle School) out of retirement and onto their new site.

While it would be difficult to name all of his favorite movies (the site might crash due to overuse of space), here’s a sample:

The Godfather, Goodfellas, The Shawshank Redemption, Adaptation, Casablanca, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters (1 and 2), Se7en, American Beauty, Little Shop of Horrors, Road to Perdition, It’s a Wonderful Life, Layer Cake, and The Departed. It doesn’t count as a movie, but he’s also obsessed with The Sopranos in a way many have called unhealthy.

Contact Kevin at kevin@movies-schmovies.com.