Ever since I read about Blast of Silence in RE/Search: Incredibly Strange Films, back in the time before you could just get a movie in moments, I’ve wanted to see this movie. I often hold back watching movies until I feel like I’m ready for them and this movie lived up to everything I thought that it would be.

Frankie Bono is a hitman working with Cleveland-based organized crime — this is where I remind you that there’s no such thing as the Mafia and Italian-Americans are a diverse group not strictly employed by organized crime — comes home over the holidays to New York City. He’s there to kill  Troiano (Peter H. Clune), which won’t be an easy kill. He’s told that if he’s seen before the kill, he won’t be paid his full paycheck.

He buys a gun and silencer from Big Ralph (Larry Tucker, who wrote Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and developed The Monkees with Paul Mazursky), a strange man who keeps sewer rats. Between his disgust for that individual and his growing memories of discontent with where he came from — growing up alone in an orphanage — and a disastrous holiday meal with old acquaintance Petey (Danny Meehan) and an even worse get-together with Petey’s sister Lorrie (Molly McCarthy) that ends with him assaulting her before regretting his actions, Frankie is falling apart before he even gets to his work.

Following Troiano and his girlfriend (Milda Memenas) to a Greenwich Village jazz club where beat artists bellow about lost love, Frankie finds Big Ralph ready to blackmail him. He follows the man home and strangles him before calling his bosses to say he can’t do the hit. He’s told he has no choice. As he starts falling to pieces, he tries to convince Lorrie to leave town with him, only to discover she already has a man (Dan Saroyan).

All alone, as he claimed he always wanted to be, he kills his mark and escapes, nearly caught multiple times, before calling for the rest of his money. The meeting place is an isolated spot by the water and Frankie is ambushed by multiple killers, shot numerous times and finally dies in the freezing December water.

He was already dead anyway. That’s because Blast of Silence may seem like a film noir from what you’ve read but it also has a completely deranged way of telling its story. That’s because Allen Baron, the director, writer and star of the movie wasn’t like most filmmakers. He got the cameras and lights for this movie from a movie he’d been on the crew for, Cuban Rebel Girls, which had been left in the country when that movie — Errol Flynn’s last — was abandoned when the production had to run in the face of the Cuban revolution. The producers of that movie — which was directed by Barry Mahon — told him that if he could get the equipment smuggled out, he could use it. As it was, Baron was already a wanted man in that country, as he was sleeping with a woman who was the girlfriend of a gangster. A confrontation ended with him shooting that man.

Shot mostly in New York City locations with no permits, the end of the film was shot at the Old Mill on a Jamaica Bay estuary on Long Island during Hurricane Donna, a location that Baron knew was a dumping ground for the dead bodies of mob hits. That moment where he hits the water and dies? That’s no stuntman. The snow and waves and rain in that scene isn’t fake either. It was filmed during Hurricane Donna.

What makes it even weirder is that the film flirts between grindhouse and arthouse, a movie that should be about bad people and murder that opens up the emotional damage that its lead is suffering from. That’s told through narration that was written by blacklisted writer Waldo Salt (Midnight Cowboy, Serpico, Coming Home) and read by also blacklisted actor Lionel Stander, which is embued with dread. Just check out how the film closes: “God moves in mysterious ways,” they said. Maybe he is on your side, the way it all worked out. Remembering other Christmases, wishing for something, something important, something special. And this is it, baby boy Frankie Bono. You’re alone now. All alone. The scream is dead. There’s no pain. You’re home again, back in the cold, black silence.”

It’s also filled with dark imagery that seems more thought-out than the normal B picture that it — on the surface — it is emulating.

Oddly, for as much about crime and murder as it seems like Baron knew, the idea that a silencer would work on a revolver is impossible.

Allen Baron was born to immigrant parents at the start of the Great Depression. In his memoir, Blast of Silence, he discusses how his father died when he was eleven, how he dropped out of school in the tenth grade, worked on the atomic bomb at sixteen years old and worked in comic books all before his mother sent him to Los Angeles to find an ex-boyfriend of hers. Once there, he ended up at Paramount Studios, inspiring him when he got back to New York City and became a cab driver. With just $20,000 he would make this movie, which was supposed to star Peter Falk. Instead, he did the role and created a movie that is still discussed sixty years later. Its creator would go on to work mostly in TV, although he did direct Terror In the City, Outside In and Foxfire Light. I find it as dark and sad as this movie that its creator went on to make episodes of The Love Boat, The Brady Bunch and The Dukes of Hazzard.

It doesn’t matter if a mine has gold in it. If it closed because a supernatural force killed everyone that went into it, perhaps you don’t need to reopen it. Well, there wouldn’t be a movie if this didn’t happen and The Strangeness, shot on 16mm with real stop-motion animation, is the result.

You can say that this movie drags — and it does — but it also has a monster that eats people and dissolves them with acidic spit and then pukes them up. It leaves behind messy corpses that are crawling with maggots, so you know, don’t eat during this.

Director Melanie Anne Phillips — who used the name David Michael Hillman — wrote this with Chris Huntley, who plays one of the trapped people in the mine and also did the special effects.

The beginning of the movie was shot without permission at a real mine called The Red Rover. About a month after, real-life miners hired to see if the mine was worth reopening entered and went further in than the film crew had. They all died. Not from being devoured and thrown up by a monster that looks like a woman’s secret garden filled with tentacles and slime, mind you, but from poison gas exposure. The rest of the movie was shot in Phillips’ grandparents’ garage using tin foil painted black for the walls of the mine.

You can watch this on YouTube.

Ishani (Megha Sandhu), Taijah (Alicia Richardson) and Mei-Ling (Erika Prevost) used to be a girl group until a talent show goes wrong. They stop being friends and life just starts to feel darker. Santa (Steven Vlahos) sends them back in time — that’s all the holiday this movie has, because it’s really about the girls getting to experience the 00s again even if they look as old as they are now, so the Hot Tub Time Machine influence is apparent beyond just the name of this. Why else would Taijah’s cousin Caleb (Gabriel Davenport), someone unconnected to their era, go back, just like that movie having the younger friend being involved? Ah, it’s Christmas. I will cut a Tubi Original a break.

While she’s back in time, the thirtysomething teenager — I know that’s what I always say about teen comedies but this is really true — Mei-Ling hooks up with the most popular boy in school so that she can get past the trauma of not being popular. So she uses a young hot boy to get what she wants. Hmm. Should I keep being nice to this movie now?

Everyone in the past says. “Prime directive?” and uses what they know of the future which is their past to start changing the present to change this past which is now their present and the paradoxes! The parallel realities they are creative! The buttery on a wheel! Or whatever! Look, I’m no scientist.

Also, shout out to jamesmcnabb on Letterboxd who rightly points out that this band has no drummer, no guitarist, three vocalists and one that plays bass and the other keyboards, but just knows how to start the presets like that old Casio bossa nova demo. Are they reinventing the way we see rock? Or whatever music this is? Is the future not just female, as Ishani graffitis on a brick wall, but also just bass and keyboards and three women singing?

What has this movie taught us about the spirit of Christmas?

At least they didn’t steal rock music from black people, which is another time travel thing that I’ve never got over. Like I want to make a movie with Body Count where they go back in time and knock out McFly and then Ice T gets with her mom and says stuff like, “Damn, dick” while Ernie C shreds and the Hill Valley High School dweebs just stare and T snarls, “I guess you guys aren’t ready for that yet, but your kids are gonna love it. Yo Beatmaster V, take these mother fucking bitches back to South Central.” I mean, I would watch that movie.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Who is Ayanna Shon?

Ayanna Shon is from Birmingham, AL but now lives in Minneapolis, MN and is a multi-hyphenated content creator having worked in the music industry, in communications, as a celeb photographer as well as starting CBA Film Studio, a full-service production company focused on creating original content with a focus in green screen music video production. She also created a weekly beginner 101 photography training vlog that lends a unique and gritty feel to the world of vlogging by embracing the hip hop culture and urban scene with tremendous flair on her YouTube channel. This is her first full-length movie and she’s also made another Christmas film, Just in Time for the Holidays.

Nikki (Monique Johnson) is facing being thirty and not having a child. Her mother keeps giving her so much drama about it, so she decides to lie for some time before finally deciding to have a baby for real. The problem? All of the marijuana she smokes makes it impossible for her to get pregnant.

I’m not sure if smoking out can keep you from being with child, but the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists stated, “Because of concerns regarding impaired neurodevelopment, as well as maternal and fetal exposure to the adverse effects of smoking, women who are pregnant or contemplating pregnancy should be encouraged to discontinue marijuana use.”

Shon told the Birmingham Times, “They key takeaway will be faith and manifestation. Also understanding and recognizing that you’re more than enough and to seek forgiveness.”

I don’t think the character Cayce is named for Edgar Cayce but if people started naming their children names like that, Blavatsky and Criswell, my life would be so much better. Please start doing that.

This movie also has Tray Chaney, Poot from The Wire in the cast. You may not recognize him with the wig and afro. He’s the hypnotist who tries to get Nikki to stop smoking.  Can you stop doing drugs by Christmas? If you have to host it and do all the cooking, shouldn’t you smoke even more?

You can watch this on Tubi.

An expanded adaptation of the Yuki-onna short story from the 1904 collection Kwaidan: Stories and Studies of Strange Things by Lafcadio Hearn, The Snow Woman was released in the U.S. — with subtitles — in 1969 under the title Snow Ghost. A similar story also is in the movie Kwaidan.

Director Tokuzo Tanaka directed many of Zatochi movies for Daiei, as well as the films Bad Reputation, The Haunted Castle and the incredible Killer Whale.  The script was by Fuji Yahiro.

An old sculptor and his student Yosaku (Akira Ishihama) are carving a statue of a goddess and looking for the perfect tree. As they shelter themselves from the snow, they meet a woman in white who freezes the master but allows his apprentice to live, as long as he never reveals that he saw her. If he does tell anyone about her, she will return to kill him.

Later, Yuki (Shiho Fujimura) comes to live near the apprentice, who waits five years for the tree to dry so that he may sculpt it. He’s dealing with a bailiff who kills the wife of the master sculptor, who reveals that her dying wish is that Yuki marries the young sculptor. The bailiff tries to make Yuki his concubine but she freezes him and all of his men, revealing herself, as the sculptor speaks of the night he met her. She leaves, rather than fulfill her oath to kill him, as she can’t leave their son an orphan.

This story had to have inspired the final story in Tales from the Darkside: The Movie. My favorite part of this movie is how any time the snow woman appears, the movie make an obvious removal from reality in color and brightness. What a gorgeous story.

You can watch this on YouTube.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4OTmjZWYp4c

Eve Carter (Leana Adams, who co-directed — with Kristina Arjona — and wrote this movie) is a middle-aged child star who has lost out on the comeback she wanted. As she hides at her sister Ashley’s (Ashlee Heath) house, she finds out that she’s sharing the place with Ace Strong (Tyler Buckingham), a stuntman who is healing from an accident and dogsitting Ashley’s dog Mickey. Eve decides that if she wants the house to herself, she has to get Ace back with his ex-girlfriend.

Back in 1987, Eve was in the movie within this movie, Christmas With the Jerks, playing Cookie Jerk, a little girl who helped her family find the true reason for the season. Maybe she never learned that lesson herself but it isn’t too late.

As for Ace, for being such a talented stuntman, he really got hurt getting dressed.

This isn’t the typical streaming holiday movie. The characters feel real and yes, we know how it’s going to all end up, but it does such a great job getting there. You come away wanting the leads to fall for each other instead of feeling cringy as the romantic moments happen.

Also, Mickey the dog is awesome.

You can watch this on Tubi.

Christina Chance (Tori Anderson) is trying to get Love Handles to make her the ambassador for their new line of products through her web show. They’ll give her the deal if she gets two million views on her Christmas Eve livestream. Except her family and image are all fake.

She’s divorced and her web husband Steve (Bradley Husband) is really dating her mom Wanda (Lisa Langlois, Class of 1984). Her dad Rick (Tim Progosh) isn’t married to her anymore, either. Her daughter Kaylee (Habree Larratt) hates the show and thinks it’s why her dad left. At least her son Hugo (Declan Cassidy) is into it.

The problem is that Love Handles employee Devon (Mykee Selkin) shows up at the wrong time and finds out the secret life of Christina. Yet the show — thanks to everyone’s hard work — goes well. But they don’t get the numbers they need, Christina doesn’t get the deal and Devon gets fired. Luckily, they hired such a great Santa (Nick Allan) that he actually is Santa, who gives them all another chance. Actually, so many chances until they finally just don’t even do the show. Devon films their entire day of just being a family and uploads it, which upsets our influencer protagonist, but when she learns that that’s what got her all the subscribers, all is forgiven and reality gets normal.

Director Stefan Brogren also made Twisted Neighbor and Obsessed to Death for Tubi. The movie was written by Brian Graves and Jacob Michael Keller.

You can watch this on Tubi.