Film Festival Solution
How It Works
Teams were given a list of movie summaries with star ratings (between 1 and 4 stars). Each movie summary had been altered to contain a reference to some animal. This suggests a pun variant of the movie title for that entry. Teams figured out the animals being referenced, and indexed into the animal names using the star rating (1 star = first letter, 2 stars = second, etc.) to get a letter.
Reading down the column of letters produced another animal/movie reference: "I love the smell of napalm and beef in the morning", which suggested the mangled movie title and final answer of "Apocalypse Cow" (Apocalypse Now).
List of Movies
| Summary | Original Title |
| Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks are two rival gastropods who hate each other at the office but fall in love over the internet. | You've got Mail |
| "Hey look kids, there's Big Ben, there's Parliament, and there's a spotted dog." | European Vacation |
| Matt Damon is a reformed flatfish forced to return to the world of high-stakes poker to help a friend pay off loan sharks. | Rounders |
| Five friends journey to a cabin in the woods where they find unspeakable evil lurking in the forest in the form of crop-damaging beetles, in this classic Sam Raimi horror flick. | Evil Dead |
| Heath Ledger and Julia Stiles star in this adaptation of The Taming of the Shrew, set in a modern day sheep-filled high school. | Ten Things I Hate About You |
| Warren Beatty takes on the role of an arachnid parasitic detective in this comic book adaptation. | Dick Tracy |
| Tobey Maguire finds himself sucked into a 1950s television show, complete with loving parents, old-fashioned values, overwhelming naivet�, and a flock of game birds. | Pleasantville |
| Tea Leoni plays a reporter who discovers that the world is in danger due to a collision with a large wooly barnyard animal. | Deep Impact |
| Christian Slater plays a pilot who teams up with a park ranger to recover a nuclear passerine bird. | Broken Arrow |
| Kevin Bacon is a city boy who comes to a small town where rock music, dancing, and large North American deer have been outlawed. | Footloose |
| Tom Cruise is a rookie lawyer sent to defend two Marine chickens accused of murdering a colleague. | A Few Good Men |
| Rob Schneider plays an aquarium cleaner forced to pimp himself out to a series of cetacean clients to raise money. | Deuce Bigalow Male Jigolo |
| Adaptation of the classic Roald Dahl book featuring an orphan who befriends human-like bugs living inside a bloodsucking parasite. | James and the Giant Peach |
| Pixar's first feature-length film, featuring a Japanese fish's struggles with a plastic spaceman. | Toy Story |
| Patrick Swayze heads a gang of teenagers banding together to defend their town from being invaded by young Soviet deer. | Red Dawn |
| Jon Carpenter's campy saga of a prisoner offered a pardon if he'll rescue the US President from an island prison populated by wildebeest. | Escape from New York |
| Sean Connery and Nicholas Cage have to retrieve biological weapons from a renegade raptor. | The Rock |
| George Romero's classic horror film follows a band of survivors trapped in a shopping mall under siege by zombie shellfish. | Dawn of the Dead |
| Danny DeVito and Billy Crystal conspire to murder a South American mammal in this twisted comedy. | Throw Mama from the Train |
| Val Kilmer leads a team of brilliant students developing a laser for what they believe is a class project. But it turns out the government wants to use their work to arm a squadron of snake-like fish. | Real Genius |
| Australian marsupials battle to the death in this campy video game adaptation. | Mortal Kombat |
| A girl from Kansas leads a group of misfits to see a reptile in the Emerald City. | The Wizard of Oz |
| "DO, a dog, a female dog." | The Sound of Music |
| Peter Fonda and Dennis Hopper are two bikers who travel from Los Angeles to New Orleans in search of an arachnid. | Easy Rider |
| Spike Lee's award-winning film exploring a relationship between an Italian secretary and an aquatic rodent. | Jungle Fever |
| From the geniuses that brought you Super Troopers, two brothers travel to Munich and stumble upon a secret, centuries-old competition described as "Fight Club" with venison. | Beerfest |
| Will Smith as an ocean-dwelling polyp on the run from government agents. | Enemy of the State |
| Arnold Schwarzenegger leads a triple life as computer salesman, government spy, and garbage-feeding insect. | True Lies |
| Lindsay Lohan tries to survive in a high school populated by arboreal rodents. | Mean Girls |
| A magic yellow winged nanny comes to work for a cold banker's unhappy family. | Mary Poppins |
| Cuba Gooding Jr. overacts his way through a cruise ship filled with bearded, hoofed animals. | Boat Trip |
| Harrison Ford stars in this classic adventure movie featuring archaeology and large ocean predators. | Raiders of the Lost Ark |
| Jack Nicholson's performance as a tiny rodent stuck in a psychiatric hospital earned him an Oscar for Best Actor. | One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest |
| Christian Bale stars as a rancher who agrees to hold a captured outlaw cougar awaiting a train to go to court. | 3:10 to Yuma |
| Tom Hanks leads a group of US soldiers behind enemy lines to retrieve an African feline paratrooper whose brothers have been killed in action. | Saving Private Ryan |
| Hijackers seize the steed carrying the president and his family, in this Harrison Ford film. | Air Force One |
| The movie adaptation of the TV series featuring four female New Yorkers who gossip about their sex lives and find new ways to deal with being a bug in the 90s. | Sex and the City |
| Tom Hanks stars in this fantastic tale of a boy whose greatest wish goes awry when he awakens to find himself being fattened up to produce bacon. | Big |
| Dustin Hoffman takes the best actor Oscar for his portrayal of a long-legged savant bird. | Rain Man |
| Kevin Bacon plays a regular guy who becomes tormented with visions of a dead girl and wall-climbing lizards. | Stir of Echoes |
Solution
Apocalypse Cow