Guess the Plot
A seaside town keeps its beaches open through the summer season despite a problem with a large fish. That is Jaws, and it is also a fair description of Jaws, which is the joke and the puzzle at the same time.
Every summary here is written from scratch and written badly on purpose: no names, no adjectives, no stakes, and the emotional centre of the film described as an administrative event. Strip the tone out of a story and the plot underneath is usually ridiculous.
Name the film from a deliberately flat plot summary.
Play Guess the PlotHow to attack a flat summary
Count the concrete nouns. The summaries are stripped of everything except what actually happens, so any specific object, job or place in the sentence is load-bearing — it survived a deliberate effort to remove detail, which means the film cannot be described without it.
Then work out what the sentence is refusing to say. A summary that describes a relationship in procedural terms is hiding a romance. One that describes a journey in terms of logistics is hiding a quest. The gap between the register of the sentence and the register of the film is itself the fingerprint.
Beware of the ones that sound like several films. Two of the 52 could plausibly describe half a dozen science fiction films from the same decade, and the genre clue will not separate them — the decade clue will.
The rules the summaries follow
Two hard rules kept the file honest. Never name a character, an actor or the title. And never describe something that does not actually happen — a dry summary is still a true one, so anything that needed a twist spoiled in order to make sense was rewritten to sit before the twist instead.
The titles and years line up with the film deck used by the trailer and release-year games, so a player who has been through those is guessing from the same shelf of films.
The clue ladder
Three clues at a rung each: the decade, then the genre, then a fact about how the film was made. That last one is the best-value clue in the game and often the most interesting thing on the page — that the hotel corridor fight was shot in a set mounted on a rotating rig, or that the mechanical animal kept breaking down so most of the film is shot from where it would have been.
The genre clue is less useful than it looks, because 11 of the 52 films are filed as science fiction and several more sit next door in space opera, fantasy and superhero. Knowing it is science fiction rules out less than you would like.
Scoring
Ten rounds at 1000, 620, 380 and 240, offline. The guess list is all 52 films, so scrolling it is a legitimate way to jog your memory — the summaries are written to be recognisable in hindsight and nearly impossible cold, which means seeing the title is often the whole solve.