Film Critics United

Probably the last set of updates for the FCU of 2012, assuming there will be a 2013 of which I have utmost confidence there will be.  BOOO Armageddon! Bad Karma , Copperhead , Forces Speciales , Maximum Conviction , Skyfall , Terminal Island , 6 Bullets , American Horror House , Arbitrage , Argo , Bait , Carny , Carver's Gate , Dark Relic , Aladdin and the Death Lamp , Deathstalker 2 , Flight , Ghostquake , Ghost Voyage , Grave Encounter s, The Man with the Iron Fists , Jack Hunter and the Quest for Akhenaten's Tomb , Lake Placid: The Final Chapter , Looper , Mothman , Open Graves , Paranormal Activity 4 , Paranormal Entity , Paranormal Incident , Pegasus vs. Chimera , Phantom Racer , Pterodactyl , Resident Evil: Retribution , Resident Evil: Damnation , Red Lights , Rise of the Zombies , Smiley , Super Cyclone , Taken 2 , That's My Boy , The Matrix , The Matrix: Reloaded , The Thing with Two Heads , Vamps , VHS , Wrong Turn 5 , Wreck-it Ralph , and we also updated the hom...

I know sometimes your sitting in the subway, in traffic, in the tub and you're thinking 'There's just not enough Christopher Armstead out there.  I need more, and I need it now'.  I know I do, and I'm me.  Problem Solved!  Introducing for a limited time, like forever, for the amazingly low price of ZERO dollars and ZERO cents we present the Totally Twisted Flix Android Phone Application! What?  Shut up!  No Freaking Way!   Yes Freaking Way my friends, right here by clicking this link you can have access to Totally Twisted Flix, the TV show that's for the people, all the dang time.  Hours upon hours of vintage shows at your fingertips 24 hours a day.  STOP PINCHING YOURSELF!  It is true.   Plus, when we start shooting the new shows, whenever that's going to be, they will show up on the app first!  At the same time that they show up on our Facebook page and our YouTube Channel!  We call that exclusivity where I ...

I think I can say, without fear of recrimination or rebuttal, that we are in the Golden Age of Television.  Shoot, make that the Platinum Age.  Some of the best television shows in the history of the universe are being aired right now.  I'm sure I Love Lucy, the Honeymooners and the Dick Van Dyke Show were cool and all but I'm thinking the new millennium has them beat. That being said, I don't believe I would call NBC's Parks and Recreations one of these great shows of which I speak.  I'm talking about shows like 'The Walking Dead', 'Mad Men', all those 'Spartacus' iterations on Starz, 'Game of Thrones, 'Sons of Anarchy', 'Boss'... and might I add that Frazier Crane is not very funny on that show... 'Breaking Bad', 'Dexter', and this is just to name a few because there are enough great shows out there right now to choke a pig.  Do you have any idea how difficult it is to choke a pig?  Damn difficult.  A...

Hanging out at DragonCon with the boy, representing Encode Media Group and we got some interesting stuff and met some really interesting people.  If you're in the Atlanta area during Labor Day weekend, I highly recommend that you get a hotel and enjoy the festivities.  And maybe check out a panel or two... say like the panel I was on talking about SyFy Original movies.  I'll post the interview I did with two of the other members on that panel, Teagan and Kevin, real soon like.  Special thanks to Dan Carroll for all his help in letting us cover the Con.

Laziness combined with covering the DragonCon, which we will post some stuff on soon, combined with football season starting which is directly related to laziness, movie watching has been kind of lacking.  Nonetheless, here we go! American Ninja III , The 25th Reich , Attack of the 50ft. Cheerleader , Basilisk: The Serpent King , Beyond Loch Ness , Boogeyman , Cleanskin , Dawn of the Dragon Slayer , Flying Swords of Dragon Gate , Freak Dance , Freelancers , Golden Temple Amazons , Hijacked , Meeting Evil , One in the Chamber , Outpost: Black Sun , Playback , Recreator , Soldiers of Fortune , The Aggression Scale , The Bourne Legacy , The Cold Light of Day , The Dark Knight Rises , The Devil in Me , The Expendables 2 , The Philadelphia Experiment , The Prodigies , The Tall Man , The Warrior and the Sorceress , The Watch , Total Recall , True Bloodthirst .

Abraham Lincoln vs. The Zombies , Alien , Alien Express , Alien Hunter , Alien Opponent , Alien Origin , Alien Private Eye ,  Alien Sex Files 3 , ... clearly there was a theme here... Arachnoquake , Area 407 , Beyond , Bigfoot , Black Cobra , Blood Creek , Brave , Dragon Eyes , Exit Humanity , Fireball , Hands of Steel , Ice Age: Continental Drift , Jersey Shore Shark Attack , Madagascar Europe's Most Wanted , The Girl from the Naked Eye , Piranhaconda , Prometheus , Rise of the Animals , Strippers vs. Werewolves , Superman vs. The Elite , Ted , The Amazing Spider-Man , The Philly Kid .

A few years ago I wrote a review of the movie 'Thirty Days of Night'.  That movie had no Black people in it, though the city of Barrow Alaska, where the movie takes place, does have quite a few Black people in its population.  I saw it in a documentary.  Nonetheless, I commented in that review that I observed that the movie didn't have any Black People in it and, tongue in cheek, passed it off as okay since Black people don't like cold weather all that much.  Well a young man not too long ago apparently read that and he was not happy.  I mean he was pissed .  He called me all kinds of dirty names and stupids and dumbs and basically said it's White people like me that give White people a bad name.  He also went on to tell me how much he loves cold weather and Ice hockey and Ice Coffee and frigid women and everything else cold. Of course... I'm not a White person.  I kind of thought everybody knew that already, especially since I'm an internationa...

We've updated our Blame it on Sci-Fi page, Stash House , Split Second , Zone of the Dead , The Viral Factor , The Raid: Redemption , The Dictator , Shame , Safe , Quarantine 2: Terminal , Piranha 3DD , Piranha (1978) , One Down Two to Go , Men in Black III , Man on Fire , Malibu Shark Attack , Iron Sky , Hysteria , Hit! , Growth , God Bless America , Get the Gringo , Frankenfish , El Gringo , Death Dimension , Dark Shadows , Bending the Rules , Battleship , American Battleship , Abby .

Corman's World , Orgasmo Nero , Project Viper , Space Twister , Time Barbarians , Assassin's Code , Nazi's at the Center of the Earth , Little Deaths , Lockout , 96 Minutes , Headhunters , S.S. Doomtrooper , Alien Tornado , The Three Stooges , The Cabin in the Woods , Tekken: Blood Vengeance , Think Like a Man .

Thousands of people have been asking me... 'Christopher, I never know when you update the FCU, you need to setup an RSS feed'. Okay, it was only one person... Kevin... but after lots and lots of research on how to do this, then realizing I'm not really all that bright and my research was leading nowhere, Imagine my joy to discover that Blogger does all that for you. So for now on, whenever we throw something up on the FCU, because we often throw up pages but don't update the homepage or indexes for weeks, we will let the hungry public know via the blog. Reviews recently posted are Seven Below , Lady Terminator (classic), Bad Ass , Another Earth , A Good Old Fashioned Orgy , The Samaritan , Prisoner of the Lost Universe , Point Blank , Dysfunctional Friends , China O'Brien , Barely Legal (not by Hustler), Barbarian Queen 2 , Air Collision , Transit , The Veteran , The Terror Experiment , Seattle Superstorm , Ninja the Final Duel , Jack the Reaper , Fireball ,...

I love the little mockbusting studio called The Asylum.  Sure they make largely terrible films, but to be honest with you, their pictures are the ones that keep the FCU turning.  Nobody actually cares to read what we think of... I don't know... 'The Hunger Games' because there are thousands of legitimate film critics reviewing that type of nonsense, but for something like Princess of Mars, as presented by The Asylum... not Disney... your choices are very few, we at the FCU are usually one of those very few choices. So when somebody attacks The Asylum, and that somebody isn't me, I get upset.  More so when this person is biting the hand that fed it.  Say like Traci Lords.  We don't care that Traci was an underage porn star, and neither does she or she probably would've changed her name back to Nora Jean Kuzma on her path to becoming a 'legitimate' actress... I put 'legitimate' in quotes because in my heart of hearts I do believe porno actresses ...

A young man emailed me not too long ago, wishing to know what are the requirements and training necessary to becoming a film critic. Obviously being a film critic is not an easy thing to do, right up there with Night Security Guarding or Dog Whispering in degree of difficulty as far as part time gigs go, but I did my best to point this young man on the right path, and figuring this advice is far to sage and valuable to limit to this one dude, I'm going to share the secrets of film criticism with the world! Let's begin with the valuable requirements. 1. A partially functioning eyeball. Obviously we need to see these movies so an eyeball that works somewhat is fairly key. However Tommy Edison is blind and he's a much better known film critic than me and whole lot of others with functioning eyeballs, so take this requirement with a grain of salt. 2. A functional ear. You're watching a Steven Seagal movie, you hear him speak but you can't understand a word he...