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Many critics were up in arms when Marisa Tomei took home an Oscar for her walk-through in "My Cousin Vinny." And there were those who cried foul when "Crash" won Best Picture instead of "Brokeback Mountain."

As unfair as those may seem, I can safely say that the film that was least deserving of its Academy Award was "The Crunch Bird."

Slapped together over a weekend by one Ted Petok, with all voices done by one man who lacked the talent of Mel Blanc or Don Messick, "The Crunch Bird" won over the smart National Film Board of Canada production "Evolution" and the beautifully animated Oscar Wilde adaptation "The Selfish Giant." Methinks Petok threatened to sic a crunch bird on the Academy members.

This horribly-animated short is based on one joke. One antique, middle-school joke. It probably had you ROTFL in 7th grade but it's merely stupid now.

Classic cartoon, my a*s!

It's much too obvious that the glowing positive comments supposedly from military types are actually shills who are related to the producers, or more likely fans of the star, Jim Fitzputrid - many of them have only one or two comments in total. The negative reviews are correct: "U.S. Seals" IS that horrible.

It's a damn shame William Witney is no longer with us. He could have shown the producers how to do an action movie correctly, and make it actually entertaining. And he worked with low budgets at Republic studios. About all that "U.S. Seals" has in common with the old B-Westerns and B war films (many of which Witney directed) is shootouts in which the bad guys can't hit the side of a battleship, yet the good guys fire wild shots that magically kill the baddies, often bloodlessly.

The threadbare production is embarrassing. The command center that looks like someone's living room, American military personnel using Russian weapons, the visible squib wires running up the bad guy's leg in the scene where he's shot to death-- these have been pointed out in the other reviews (the ones not posted by shills, of course).

Watching this back to back with "American Soldiers" is recommended only for the masochistic.

I can only assume Ron Ormond made these religious films at the end of his career to atone for all the horrid B-flicks he inflicted upon moviegoers in the '50s. That is understandable. "The Burning Hell" was exhibited mainly in southern Protestant churches, Sunday schools and Christian schools - who then plastered every storefront in town with placards advertising the film ("20,000 Degrees Fahrenheit - and Not a Drop of Water!" One wonders how they came up with that measurement). It was in a "Christian school" that I was subjected to this cinematic Hades, in glorious 16mm. The reaction from our 11th grade class was anything but reverent. There was much for us to titter and chuckle over as we were shushed by the Bob Jones-alumni faculty. The Southern-accented Moses with the fake beard ("Y'all let mah people go") - the pasty-white desert dwellers - - the idiot teen bouncing around on the seat of his motorcycle before crashing it, literally losing his head, and plunging into HAYull - and the silly Satan whose face was painted like the Partridge Family's bus (the tricycle-riding Tom Waits in the "I Don't Wanna Grow Up" video was a more plausible devil) - we couldn't take this seriously at all, despite the teachers acting like this catchpenny film was as much Holy Writ as the leather-bound Bibles they clutched. I'm not about to enter into a theological discussion - I will only say that with the amateur histrionics, Estus Pirkle's incessant preaching, and Ormond's inept-as-ever direction, those who view this film may well enter heaven, for they've already been through "The Burning Hell."