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Web Video / Chris Stuckmann

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Christopher Stuckmann (born April 15, 1988) is an American filmmaker, YouTuber and film critic. He is known as one of the most popular figures of YouTube's film community, though he does have his fair share of other content related to topics including video games and anime. His YouTube channel reached one million subscribers on June 20, 2017, and two million on July 26, 2022.

Stuckmann first got into film criticism in his teenage years, but has been a lover of film his entire life. He has cited Roger Ebert as his chief influence for pursuing film criticism, and credits the experiences of watching Signs, Minority Report and Spider-Man in theaters as a teenager for igniting his passion for filmmaking. In his twenties, he unearthed the community of film critics on YouTube, and the rest is history.

While Stuckmann had been writing and directing shorts and features with friends and family as early as his adolescence — including a series of Indiana Jones fan films with none other than himself as Indy — he began a more public filmmaking career in the late 2010s (barring an unfinished short in 2013). As of now, he has released two short films: the horror-comedy Auditorium 6 (2017) and the comedy-drama Notes from Melanie (2019). While the former has only been shown at film festivals, the latter was released on his channel for free public viewing.

In July 2021, it was announced that Stuckmann had signed with production company Paper Street Pictures to write and direct his debut feature film, a horror film titled Shelby Oaks based on the Paranormal Paranoids, a fictional mid-2000s U.S. paranormal investigative team. The film was slated to enter production in 2021, but as Stuckmann explained in February 2022, plans were postponed as a result of the since-averted IATSE strike. A Kickstarter campaign started in March of that year to secure additional funding ultimately raised a historic $1,390,845 — over a million dollars more than its initial $250,000 goal. The film was shot in 28 days between May and June 2022 and is currently in post-production.

Stuckmann also announced in July 2021 that he would be retiring regular movie reviews with graded scores, instead shifting towards giving unscored reviews for movies he wants to draw attention and support to, as well as videos tailored toward people seeking information on making films. However, he eventually began giving unscored reviews of new releases as well.

In November 2021, Stuckmann announced that his wife Sam had given birth to twin boys. They were born the day after Chris made his announcement video about directing Shelby Oaks.

Stuckmann has also published two books: The Film Buff's Bucket List (2016), containing 50 movies from the 2000s "to see before you die", and Anime Impact (2018), a history of the most influential films and shows in anime.

He has an account on Instagram.

Stuckmann is also both an approved Rotten Tomatoes critic and member of the Critics Choice Association. In 2014, he was added to Channel Awesome, but parted ways with them in April 2018.

    open/close all folders 

    Movies That Have Received "F" Ratings 

    Movies That Have Received "A+" Ratings 
Do note that some of the films listed are on Chris' "A+ Movies" playlist because he featured them in other segments.

    Movies That Have Been Analyzed 

    Movies That Have Received Hilariocity Reviews 

     Video Games That Have Received 10/10 Ratings 

Chris and his channel provide examples of:

  • Shared Universe: Because he became part of Channel Awesome, and did a few crossovers, he's part of the Reviewaverse.
  • Sherlock Scan: See A God Am I above.
  • Signature Scene: In-Universe; this is his opinion of the car chase sequences in Collide, which he considers the only bright spot in an otherwise terrible film, and he gives the film a D-minus for that.
  • Signing-Off Catchphrase: “And if you like this, you can click right here...and get Stuckmannized,” which is often preceded by something along the lines of “You guys are the best” or “Thank you so much for watching.”
  • Sir Swears-a-Lot: Over time, his swearing grew from “occasional Precision F-Strike” to a downplaying of this trope. There’s no denying that his vocabulary has gotten more colorful over the years.
  • Slow-Loading Internet Image: He mocks Unforgettable for playing this straight in modern times, where loading images isn't usually a problem.
  • So Bad, It's Good:
    • This is generally his In-Universe opinion on movies that he reviews as Hilariocities, with some exceptions, and also some movies with F ratings count if he found them enjoyably bad.
    • Discussed in his “Worst Movies of 2016” video, where he talks about how Nine Lives (his very least favorite of the year) had already developed a cult following due to being a movie that’s so bad that one can watch it and just be amazed at the fact that it exists. However, Chris himself considers it a case of Suckiness Is Painful, given how many genuinely talented people were involved.
  • Some of My Best Friends Are X: He gives a rather sudden, drawn-out, and completely unnecessary (since nobody had accused him of being a racist) version of this trope during his review of Get Out (2017), complete with a picture of him standing amongst a small group of young black people. To say that viewers were amused would be a massive understatement.
  • Sophisticated as Hell: As mature and composed as his reviews can be, there are times where he has to swear or use tropes like Big, Stupid Doodoo-Head to vent his emotions about a movie.
  • Splash of Color: His Sin City: A Dame to Kill For skit is in black-and-white except for the red lipstick of the dame.
  • Squick: Invoked when Chris mentions in his "Worst Movies of 2015" video that his experience watching Fifty Shades of Grey was among his worst, from the humid air to middle-aged women moaning as they were watching the film. Yeah...
  • Straw Critic: Sometimes he gives bad movies the hate they deserve and other times he rants about movies like Sharknado and Piranha 3DD that weren’t trying to be great. Chris responds to this in a just manner, saying that all movies should aspire to be great with the opportunities, money, and time that is being put into them.
  • Stuff Blowing Up:
    • The explosion in his intro.
    • He starts his Movie 43 review by showing footage of him returning to his apartment after watching the film, slowly becoming consumed with anger, and exploding into a gory mess.
  • Stunned Silence:
    • His video on Paranormal Activity: The Ghost Dimension, where the whole review is done in his head as the movie was so bad that he couldn’t articulate his thoughts.
    • This is repeated with his Unforgettable review.
    • It happens again in his review of Cats.
      Chris: ... wow.
  • Stylistic Suck: Chris says in his Nine Lives review that, had it not been directed by Barry Sonnenfeld nor starred Kevin Spacey, he would have thought it was a deliberately bad movie like Sharknado, but he notes that the film is made by people actually trying.
  • Suddenly Shouting: In the beginning of his review of The Emoji Movie:
    Chris: [in a monotonous voice] The Emoji Movie is about the "Meh" emoji and how he has a lot of other expressions besides meh. And today I went and saw it. And it SUUUUUUUUUUUUCKED!!!!!!
  • Sweetness Aversion: Chris invokes this in his review of Alex Cross, as he despises its attempts to create drama and family bondage, which only come off as unhealthily sappy and melodramatic.
  • Take That!: In his review of The Nut Job 2: Nutty by Nature, he says that the film is still better than "the recent animated version of cancer on film".
  • The Teaser: Some of his reviews open with these:
  • Tempting Fate:
    • After reviewing Boyhood and seeing that it had a perfect 100% on Rotten Tomatoes, Chris tweeted that there would be that one critic that would disagree with a seemingly unanimous public opinion and bump the film down to a 99%. Surely enough, this ended up occurring when out of the 156 critics that reviewed the movie, two were against the film.
    • A benevolent example in his 2015 Oscar nominations reaction video; Chris prefaces it with the hope that The Tale of the Princess Kaguya gets a Best Animated Feature nod but believes that it will be left out. However, Kaguya is the last movie mentioned as a nominee, much to Chris’ pleasant surprise (although it did end up losing to Big Hero 6).
    • An unusual case in that it took four years: when reviewing Robin Hood (2018), he says that he thought that The Legend of Hercules (released in 2014) would be the last film he saw with 300-style slow-motion action sequences, but he was proven wrong with Robin Hood.
  • Think of the Children!: In his “Have Directors Forgotten How to Film Action?” video, he discusses a scene in Taken 2 where Liam Neeson’s character’s daughter dropped grenades from a rooftop, and gave a little soliloquy about how there could’ve been a baby down on the ground that could’ve been killed by a detonating grenade. The way he delivers said soliloquy makes it very hard to tell if he’s being serious or not.
  • This Is Gonna Suck: Several thumbnails, including the one for his Fifty Shades Freed review, feature him looking depressed.
  • Thumbnails Always Lie:
    • The thumbnail for his “Worst Movies of 2011” video features Adam Sandler as shown as the male lead on the poster for Jack and Jill. You’d think that movie would be the #1 worst such movie, but it’s only #7.
    • The thumbnail for his review of Monster Trucks has the same face he used for his review of Fantastic Four (2015), a movie that he gave an F. However, he gives the other movie a C-minus.
  • Took the Bad Film Seriously: Invoked when reviewing a bad film, as he’ll always give credit to the actors who tried to give good performances to save face. For example, his Assassin's Creed (2016) review was scathing save for his mentioning of some desperately good actors in it, and he gives the film a D for that reason alone when he’d probably have given it a F otherwise.
  • Trailers Always Spoil: He touched on this trope in his “Are Trailers Ruining Movies?” video, where he says that modern-day trailers give out too many plot details that would have otherwise surprised you. He directly mentioned Cast Away and Terminator Salvation as films that had trailers that gave away important plot points, mentioned Drive (2011) as a film that was mis-marketed to appeal to a certain audience, and mentioned The Amazing Spider-Man 2 as a film that not only spoiled itself quite a bit but also contained Missing Trailer Scenes.
    • He has cited The Matrix as an aversion, since the trailers mainly pushed the film’s Driving Question (“What is the Matrix?”) instead of giving it away.
  • Video Game Movies Suck:invoked He had some fun with this trope in a series of Hilariocities he did in late 2016 targeting bad video game films (DOA: Dead or Alive, House of the Dead, Doom) in anticipation for the Assassin's Creed (2016) film. Tragically, he found it to be just as bad as those, leading him to declare full faith in this trope.
    • In 2023, he talked about this trope and the "curse" surrounding video game movies as a result of it being brought up repeatedly after the premiere of the TV series of The Last of Us, with the prevailing narrative among news outlets being about how it "broke the curse". He stated that he no longer believes this trope to be accurate with all video game movies, listing off several video game movies that he found to be good or even great, such as the two Sonic films, Castlevania and Silent Hill.
  • Wham Line: After a good decade of touting Dragonball Evolution as his least favorite film of all time, his Cats review saw him reading some thoughts he wrote about the film in a defeated monotone:
    1. If Dante had seen Cats, he would've included a tenth circle of hell.
    2. Cats makes Dragonball Evolution tolerable.
  • What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Invoked in his review of Nine Lives, where he rants about how the film is rated PG and yet most of its run time consists of business meetings and similar things equally likely to bore children stiff, and also includes a scene with two security guards who decide to tase a cat for laughs and a scene where a character decides to commit suicide.
  • Worst. Whatever. Ever!
    • invoked He utters the phrases “worst hero ever” and “worst villain ever” frequently in his Hilariocity review of Battlefield Earth, as he notes just how many dumb decisions the protagonist and antagonist make.
    • He considers Norm of the North the worst animated film he’s ever seen in a theater, and has repeatedly cited Dragonball Evolution as his most hated film of all time.
  • You Have GOT to Be Kidding Me!: He manages to create a rare nonverbal example in his Fifty Shades of Grey review. While going through (and usually promptly destroying) the items he received in a goodie bag he "won" at the screening he attended, he gets to the last item... looks up at the camera with a wholly unamused expression... and holds up a FSOG sleep mask, resemblant of a BDSM blindfold.
    Chris: I really wish I had this blindfold when the movie was playing.
Thank you so much for watching, guys, and as always, if you liked this, you can click right here... and get Stuckmannized.

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