Ruthlessreviews.com

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Ruthless Reviews is a website based in Los Angeles, California that features several American film and media critics.

1 About the Website
2 The reviews
3 Matt Cale
4 Black Metal Pics
5 Ruthless Guide to 80s Action
6 The Ruthless Forum
7 Media coverage
8 Notes and references
9 External links

[edit] About the Website

Ruthless Reviews was founded in 2001 by Jonny Lieberman and Erich Schulte. The site's tagline is "Ruthless Reviews: Where Nihilists Debate Pornographers About Pop Culture." Ruthless features reviews of movies, TV shows, and music (especially heavy metal), along with an internet forum for the discussion of a wide range of subjects. Opinions expressed on the site lean towards strong atheistic, libertine, and liberal (in the U.S. political meaning of the word) ideologies.

[edit] The reviews

Ruthless features reviews of movies, television shows, books, radio shows, and hardcore pornography. It also provides interviews with celebrities, NFL picks, and rants covering current events and culture. The reviews are highly opinionated articles containing a blend of viciousness, humor, sarcasm, satire, biting insults, self-deprecation, and misanthropy. Critical or insane letters to the editor are subsequently reposted in, and publicly ridiculed by the forum. The site's reviews are often referred to as "vulgar" by other websites;^[1] the Internet Movie Database, for instance, labels the reviews as "potentially offensive," the only site to receive such an honor.

[edit] Matt Cale

Ruthless' most prolific contributor and author of hundreds of reviews, Matt Cale offers readers scathing analyses of movies and popular culture. Cale is the author of "Matt Cale's Shithouse Cinema"[1] and "Matt Cale's DVD Club"[2]. Cale is also a vicious essayist and a major contributor to the "Ruthless Guide to 80s Action". Since 2003, Cale has provided annual coverage of both the Telluride Film Festival and the Denver Film Festival. Mr. Cale resigned in disgust on February 19, 2008.

[edit] Black Metal Pics

One of Ruthless Reviews' most linked-to features is its 2004 feature "Top 10 Most Ridiculous Black Metal Pics of All Time". Mike from Hobart, author of the feature, claims in response to the list to have received death threats and hate mail from black metal fans, and thank you letters from record labels. In 2005, Hobart followed up with the features "10 Most Ridiculous Rap/Hip-Hop Pics of All Time", "(The Other) 10 Most Ridiculous Black Metal Pics of All Time", [3] and Matt Cale contributed "The Top 10 Ugliest Men in Heavy Metal History". [4]

[edit] Ruthless Guide to 80s Action

Another central feature of the site is the "Ruthless Guide to 80s Action", a collection of reviews covering the era of sweaty, and arguably homoerotic American action films from 1980–1992.[5] Each review takes note of what Ruthless holds to be the genre's common themes: pervasive albeit closeted homosexuality, thinly-veiled fascism, as well as an enormous "body count". Notable films of this era include Commando, Predator, the Rambo series, and the Death Wish series. Prominent actors of this era include Arnold Schwarzenegger, Steven Seagal, Sylvester Stallone, Chuck Norris, Charles Bronson, and Jean-Claude Van Damme.

[edit] The Ruthless Forum

The Ruthless Forum [6] consists of over a thousand registered members. They discuss current events, politics, culture, pornography, films, television, Matt Cale's cheeseburger gut, etc. and often communicate with a rotation of custom emoticons. "Netspeak" type slang, popular in most online forums, is frowned upon and punished with embarrassing word filters. After several years online, there is a small central core of long-standing posters, and an ongoing rotation of new posters and read-only "lurkers".

[edit] Media coverage

Ruthless Reviews received national attention in August 2005 when the conservative website WorldNetDaily (WND) reported that a Ruthless Forum member by the name of TheFreakKingdom posted photos of himself in the forum that showed him dancing on the grave of former U.S. President Ronald Reagan. The WND report labelled TheFreakKingdom as a "Satanist", due to the user title (or rank) he possessed at the time. ^[1]