Film Critics United

So I'm going through my ZuneHD... note I could've just said 'MP3 Player' but where's the cache in that? But anyway, I'm going through my ZuneHD and the arduous task of tagging my tunes because a lot of the tunes are listed as 'Unknown'. Of course when one hears 'You Dropped a Bomb on Me' we know it's The Gap Band but now my MP3 Player... I mean my ZuneHD... knows as well. Then I run across this song titled 'Girl It's Alright'. I've never heard this song, I have no idea who is singing this song and I do not know how it got on my player but this song wasn't so bad. I actually had to Google the lyrics to find out who performed this song, but the funny thing is that every time I clicked ENTER, Google came back with Steven Seagal as the artist, no matter how many times I re-typed it in. I knew that Steven Seagal had a musical album making the rounds, considering the man's a musician in addition to being a kung fu maste...

Man... don't nobody love a 'Rocky' movie more than me. Rocky was a great sports movie, a great love story, a great drama... there was a reason that this movie won the Academy Award for Best Picture back in 1976 though I assign no value to arbitrarily assigned awards. And it is because of Mr. T's senseless snub in Rocky 3, an event that taught me that arbitrarily assigned awards by corrupt committee's have no value. But the other day Sylvester Stallone was inducted into the boxing hall of fame. Seriously. A hall of fame that includes the likes of Ali, Frazier, Sugar Ray's Leonard and Robinson, Chavez, Hagler, Marciano, Dempsey, Duran, Graziano and now Rocky Balboa. Despite the fact that Rocky Balboa doesn't really exist. Now I'm not here to denigrate Sly in any kind of way because the man probably does belong in some kind of Hall of Fame. I have no doubt he has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, which he no doubt deserves, and he probably even h...

Me and Film Critics United have been trudging along for going on five years now, almost non-stop, watching movies and piling up typographical errors but two months ago we finally hit the wall. We simply could not gather up the power to watch another movie as we had to decompress, regroup, refocus and do something else. Note in addition to caring for Film Critics United we also have tend to the Totally Twisted Flix television show, there's a full time job that occasionally needs my attention... since being an Internet film critic and the host of a television show that nobody watches doesn't pay all that well... not to mention a beautiful wife to neglect and a child to ignore, so we had to let it go for a while. We weren't stagnant in those two months off however. For instance I broke out my power tools which I barely no how to operate and built a stand-up arcade cabinet which is sweet . If you are any kind man you have to have power tools even if you have no idea how to ...

A few months back a friend of my mine gives me the 411 on this Starz production of 'Spartacus Blood and Sand'. He tells me it's a good show. He tells me it has a little bit too much 'man on man love' for his tastes... but outside of that, it's a good show. Even though I don't watch much television when the football season ends but I do have that fancy u-verse with all the packages and what-not so I DVR this show. Never got around to watching it. A couple of weeks back combing through the DVR stuff I see this show and decided I should delete it to save some space, but before I do this maybe I should at least watch the first episode. That first episode was pretty good. Not great, but decent. Decent enough for to pick up the next episode the following day. That second show was even better and now I'm hooked in. Amazingly this pattern would continue as each show would be better than the show concluded with the 'KILL THEM ALL' episode. Bab...

I finished watching the movie 'The Ghost Writer' mainly because it came so highly recommended by so many film critics and film watchers alike. It was a pretty good movie with some interesting plot twists but it was a thriller without a heckuva lot of thrills and it did run unnecessarily long. But I have to be honest with you... if I had known that convicted raping pedophile Roman Polanski had directed it, I probably wouldn't have watched it. I know this makes me look bad. I'm close minded and narrow minded. Seriously, this was over thirty years ago... get over it already. It was the 70's, the age of free love... sexually abusing kids was cool back then. Besides she consented. 13 year old girls make all kinds of wise critical decisions. Plus this cat made 'Chinatown' which should give him some leeway when it comes rape and pedophilia. No... no sir it does not. Roman Polanski is a convicted rapist and a pedophile, these simple facts are not up for d...

One of the hot videos floating around is the one of those Georgia cops responding to a call from a fearful 57-year-old school teacher afraid that there was a prowler on her premises. Her reward for calling the police for 'help' was getting tazed repeatedly while begging them to stop electrocuting her. This particular incident is just another in a long line of incidents of Local Law enforcement 'assisting' the public via electrocution. One of my favorites is the story of the man who called EMS for his grandmother... oh... read the sad tale for yourself... with some of these reckless tazings leading to death. You would think typing the words 'taser' 'old' and 'woman' into your favorite search engine would just lead you to some really strange porno sites as opposed to a list of articles and videos of cops actually tasing old women. This is happening to the level where its clearly become a problem so the question is why do we have this upswing o...

Friends, Colleagues, Countrymen... this is your lucky day. People often ask me (not really) where they can catch my television show 'Totally Twisted Flix', the only TV Show in existence (to our knowledge) that only focuses on movies that are released Straight to DVD that is now in its THIRD season of production. The thing is not everyone subscribes to Dish Network which means they don't have Colours TV. And even those that do subscribe often don't make the journey all the way down to channel 9407 to watch this amazingly glorious television show. Well all of that is about to change. Kind of. In a way. Introducing the Totally Twisted Flix Facebook Fanpage ! Now this just isn't some randomly generated fanpage my friends, even though it may look that way, but as a Fan of Totally Twisted Flix not only will you be blessed with valuable clips lifted from the show featuring hard hitting reviews of important Straight to DVD movies... we're talking about life affir...

Haven't updated the FCU in the last couple of weeks, mainly because we haven't watched a movie in the last couple of weeks because we have been in Super Sunny Los Angeles California covering the Electronic Entertainment Expo. After spending a week in Los Angeles I have to seriously question why anyone would actively pursue living there unless you have an affinity towards concrete, overcrowding and traffic. And exorbitantly high liquor prices. And ten percent sales tax. And having four roomates. And no pro football team. Now if you like those things then L.A. is a virtual dreamland but I don't really care for high sales tax and constant traffic gridlock so me and L.A. didn't get along that well, but of course to each his own. It took our crew almost two hours every day to make it from Studio City to downtown, despite the fact that Studio City is, what... fifteen miles away from downtown? And it really doesn't seem to matter what time of day either. You would ...

A few posts back we listed what we thought were the baddest badasses in movie history, or at least out of the movies we've seen. Because of our somewhat narrow badass criteria there were no women on the actual list though a few did make it as honorable mention, but women were missing mainly because most of the female badasses in movies are driven by something outside of simply being badass. Usually it's some form of maternity. Ah, but then we saw Donnie Yen's latest beatemup ' 14 Blades ' which features this woman here, former Miss Hong Kong Kate Tsui as the character of Tuo Tuo. If ever there was a character born into badassness, here she is. Like a true badass she doesn't say much and what little she does say is either an overt or a thinly veiled threat to kill you. She seems to be angry all of the time for no particular reason, her fighting skills are such that at one point during this movie Donnie Yen's character actually had to run from her and whil...

I'm a Detroiter . Not a native since I came here to go to college twenty years ago by way of St. Louis, met and married a pretty girl and have been here ever since, but I still consider it my home. Just can't get with American League baseball. Detroit has been in the news recently. If the words 'Detroit' and 'News' are used in the same sentence then you know something beyond terrible must have occurred. This time its about as bad as it gets as seven year old Aiyana Jones was shot to death, by a police officer's stray bullet, in an ill- conceived raid to corral a murder suspect. I imagine there will be a full investigation, the officer who fired the bullet will be reprimanded and probably suspended though I doubt he will serve any time but that will all take care of itself and that's not what we are here to talk about. It's everything else surrounding the death of Aiyana Jones that we are touching upon here today. Before Aiyana's body h...

Everybody is all in a tizzy over Newsweek writer Ramin Setoodeh crapping all over poor Sean Hayes and his broadway performance as a straight man in the play Promises, Promises. To sum it up in a sentence the man, a gay dude himself, basically said folks just can't get around a gay man playing a straight man. Personally, I don't think that's entirely true. Sean Hayes could be cast as the next 'Rambo' for all I care, I don't give a damn, but he'd be Jack from 'Will and Grace' playing Rambo not Sean Hayes playing Rambo. I don't think the fact that Sean Hayes was gay in that show, and is gay in real life is the issue there. It's the fact that the character he played was so over-the-top iconically gay (iconically is not a real word by the way) and for sooooo long that's the issue. Eric McCormack was gay on that show too but he doesn't seem to have any issue going back to playing straight characters. I know the man isn't gay in...

Combined, the movie studio known as The Asylum and the Sci-Fi Channel have unleashed upon our eyes some of the worst movies known to mankind. Ed Wood probably wouldn't work for these cats but these two great forces have gotten together and have reached the Zenith of their creative prowess... They have crafted their 'Godfather', their 'Citizen Kane'... They have merged crap, ineptitude, incompetence and entertainment in a way that I don't think it has ever been merged before in the instant classic... 'Mega Piranha'! While we did a full ' review ' of this movie over at the FCU, this movie has so much crap goodliness in it that it deserves further editorializing. First examine the stars of this movie. Paul Logan is a man that can only be termed as an Asylum Day-Player since he shows up in so many of their flicks but his perseverance has paid off as he is given the lead in this movie, and deservingly so. Paul Logan may have attended an acting cl...

My friends, it is nigh time that we weigh in on who we believe are the baddest badasses in badass history. At least of those movies I've seen. But when examining badassery there are some rather stringent qualifications for one to pass through, a gauntlet of sorts, to achieve total badassery. You see I believe that for the most part a character has to be born a badass and almost relish in badassery. While John McClane is definitely a badass, John McClane would rather not be a badass and just spend quality time with his wife, daughter, on vactation, at the airport... It's just that wherever he is extenuating circumstance cause for him to use his specialized skill set. Then there's the case of Martin Riggs who we would never deny his place on the mountain of badassery, but if his wife was never murdered then he'd be tending a garden somewhere instead of killing South African's and Gary Busey. Then take Chow Yun-fat's character from 'The Killer' who is a bad...

But only temporarily it would seem. This is what happens when you register a domain with one company and host it at another. Apparently the FCU domain name expired on Feb 28th, thanks for the 411 Hoskey... no thanks to Yahoo Domains who failed to alert a brother of this, and are impossible to reach and navigating their website is even more difficult. Remember the good old days when you could call somebody? Anyway, then we had to go through the incredibly painful process of transferring the domain from Yahoo to GoDaddy who hosts the site, who also offers no one a simple stroll in the park, but the domain is locked and needs to be unlocked for this to take place, but we can't get in to the domain because its expired... it's complexities are mind boggling. Once the hoops of unlocking the site were jumped through came the multi step process of actually transferring the name, and reassigning DNS and all other kinds of nonsense. Heaven only knows when this is going to be complet...

As promised, here is the follow-up to 'Why Must the Black Guy Die...' pulled from this seasons episode of Totally Twisted Flix which further examines the pheomenah of African American Death in horror movies. We present to you... 'Still Dead'. Note that this is completely tongue in cheek because if they stop killing Black people in horror movies then Black people probably wouldn't get work in horror movies and I've heard a rumor that Black actors like to eat and pay their rent so keep that murderization coming and keep a brother employed. Think you can name all the movies that we pulled these clips and stills from?

I got a little Totally Twisted Flix treat for you. For this third season of the show, yes three seasons of a television show and we still exist in complete anonymity, we have made a music video follow-up to a show from the first season examining African American Death in Straight to DVD horror movies. But before I bless you with this video of EXTREMELY suspect quality, which will follow in a couple of days, I'm going to give you this video clip from the first season a few years back, which will serve as a primer of sorts and ease you in. This here is in the vein of a slam style poetry recital, minus all of the social relevance.

As another football season nears its conclusion I ask this question which I have posed before. It has been established that I am a fan of the Detroit Lions, and note that with the Saints going to the Super Bowl there is but one lone team in the NFC that has yet to make an appearance in that glorious game. I'll let you guess who that one team is. Anyway, it is no scoop that the Lions suck. But lets examine the Vikings for a moment. For almost my entire life as a football fan, and I've been around for a bit now, the Minnesota Vikings have almost always put out a competitive product, with a lot of their teams being just flat out amazing. The Purple People Eaters of the 70's, Joey Browner's Viking teams of the 80's, the unstoppable Randall Cunningham team of the 90's and now this team here. I thought the collapse by the '98 team was bad but this one might've been even worse. I was pulling for the Saints to win because I thought it would be good for N...

Personally I'm not into doing top ten lists but somebody somewhere told me I should compile something. But to show how I Stick It To The Man I'm doing a top eleven. Obviously this is a list of only the movies I've seen in 2009 and also note that I do not differentiate from theatrical releases and Straight to DVD releases as they are just movies to me. 11. Outlander Here you have a movie that cost 50 million dollars to make and according to Box Office Mojo raked in a little more than 100k which just might make Outlander the biggest flop in movie history. Sure Waterworld was a flop but it still made almost 90 million bucks. But recognize that I love me monster movie and Outlander was a damn good monster movie. The premise of Vikings vs. Spacemen might've been a little wacky but a monster movie has to be all about the monster and the monster in this flick was angry, bitter, vengeful, violent and damn near invincible. If you like common sense then look elsewhere but...