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?
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.
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.
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.
Trapped Alive was the first film to come out of Wisconsin’s now-defunct Windsor Lake Studios. Ah, the days when video stores offered a ready-made place for horror. I know we have streamings but allow me to be the old man yelling at a cloud and say, “It’s not the same.”
Robin (Sullivan Hester) and Monica (Laura Kallison) are on their way to a holiday party when they’re carjacked by escaped prisoners Randy Carter (Mark Witsken), Mongo (Michael Nash) and Louis Napoleon (Alex Kubik). Taken hostage, the cops soon give chase which leads them directly down the shaft of the Forever Mine.
Now, the girls are trapped with the criminals and — can it get worse? — a cannibal mutant (Paul Dean) is looking to feed. His daughter Rachel (Elizabeth Kent, who is in another Windsor-Lake movie, Mindwarp) has to allow the town’s only cop Billy Williams (Randy Powell) into the mine after Robin’s father (Cameron Mitchell!) begs for help.
Directed by Leszek Burzynski, who wrote the story with Julian Weaver, Trapped Alive was made as Forever Mine. The original VHS box art had two models on it. Neither of them are in the movie.
Directed and written by Fred Dekker, “The Thing from the Grave” starts happy when centerfold model Stacy (Teri Hatcher) and photographer Devlin Cates (Kyle Secor) fall in love. It doesn’t stay that way because her stalker ex Mitch Bruckner (Miguel Ferrer) kills him.
Crypt Keeper?
“Oops! Looks like you caught the old Crypt Keeper checking out one of his ghoulie magazines. Which gives you a little hint about tonight’s dead-time story. It’s all about the way some guys just die over a pretty girl. But don’t worry kiddies, if it starts to reek a little of rotten romance I think the title of our nasty narrative makes no bones about where it’s heart is really at. I call it “The Thing From the Grave.”
“The Thing from the Grave” is from Tales from the Crypt #22 and was written by Al Feldstein and William M. Gaines and drawn by Al Feldstein.
This has one of the craziest images in the show, as the undead Devlin pulls Mitch into the grave and buries them both. It’s also the first of three appearances by the sadly gone Ferrer would make on the show.
Directed and written by Danny Perez, this film is about Lou (Natasha Lyonne) waking up after a party and feeling the same way she did when she was pregnant, more than a year ago, a horrific experience that ended with her losing her baby in a nightclub toilet. Sadie (Chloë Sevigny) believes that she is knocked up again and hiding the fact. But life goes on and so does work. as Lou cleans a motel, a place where she runs into strange people like Lorna (Meg Tilly).
There’s also Gabriel (Mark Webber), Sadie’s boyfriend, a drug dealer who doesn’t just sell weed and pills. He gets experimental mind-altering substances that will give you the promise of Screamers for real — they will turn your skin inside out.
Lorna comes to Lou after she has an episode where some beings from Funzone, an arcade, experiment on her pregnancy and leave her with a festering blister on her foot. Claiming to be a clairvoyant, Lorna says that she was visited by similar creatures when she was in the military. Lou has a worse origin story — she was traded to a mysterious man named Isaac (Neville Edwards) in return for drugs and Gabriel had used her as a test subject for an experimental hormone for women that he’s selling as a street drug.
Lorna tries to remove Lou’s child with a cesarian section but she still gives birth to a head. A SWAT team arrives, as do Gabriel and Issac. Lorna is killed and Isaac reveals that he has been to space and this experiment is to make children that can survive toxins — like all the drugs inside Lorna’s body — and asks for her help in creating the perfect new being. She refuses as she gives birth to the body of the creature, which causes her to deflate. Whatever that thing is, it kills everyone in the trailer, and at the end, more SWAT arrive to find it holding its head in its hands.
This movie finds its protagonist finding that the party has ended and that now, you get high just to escape. What was once fun has become work, as you live in a small town where everyone is constantly either getting messed up or stuck in a permanent bad trip. Why should a week-long pregnancy change anything? This movie feels like where I came from.
At the height of sheer Q-Anon craziness — I think probably when a shaman in red, white and blue facepaint led an army of people into government buildings, and people defecated on the walls, maybe — people were grasping for straws and pearls and wondering, “How could this happen?”
I’m here to tell you that this has always been here.
In the 1980s, high school me was the same as old me. I was always in black, with long hair, and I only cared about music, movies and studying weird things. As such, I was brought into the Core Group, a team of teachers led by an occult expert cop who studied which students could be worshipping Satan. This group was led by my godmother.
The Satanic Panic wasn’t started by Michelle Remembers, but it felt like it was. The union of Canadian psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder and his psychiatric patient (and eventual wife, but we’ll get to that) Michelle Smith. In the mid-70s, while treating Michelle for depression due to a miscarriage, she confessed to him that she knew that something horrible had happened to her and could not recall what it was. Using hypnosis, Michelle was soon screaming for 25 minutes non-stop and speaking in the voice she had as a child. 14 months and 600 hours later, a conspiracy was found: Michelle’s mother and other citizens in Victoria were members of a worldwide Church of Satan.
At one point, Michelle was part of a ritual that lasted 81 days that Satan himself showed up for, and during that time, she was tortured, raped, witnessed others get killed and was covered with the blood of murdered babies until St. Michael the Archangel, Mary and Jesus appeared, healing all of her scars and blocking all of her memories of the years of Satanic desecration of her body and soul.
None of these stories were challenged, even a decade after, when Michelle and Laurel Rose Willson, who wrote Satan’s Underground about being a breeder for Satanists and having two of her children killed in snuff films, were on Oprah Winfrey and at no moment did Oprah challenge either of them, in 1989. The year, I was repeatedly questioned and challenged and told that I was giving my soul to Satan.
I was a white kid from a small town, and in no way have I ever dealt with racism, sexism, transism or any isms in any other way again. This experience, however, showed me a small, tiny glimpse into what it’s like to know you’re right and everyone is sure you’re wrong based on no facts at all.
By the 80s, Pazder was an occult expert, consulting in the McMartin preschool trial and appearing on a 20/20 segment called “The Devil Worshippers” that stoked the flames of the Satanic Panic. That report claimed that movies like The Godsend, The Incubus, Amityville II: The Possession, Exorcist II: The Heretic, The Exorcist, The Omen and Omen 2 allowed people to visualize and be inspired by the devil. This aired in prime time on ABC, a major cable network. They also refer to The Satanic Witch as a book filled with evil rites. And then, of course, heavy metal. As Anton LaVey was in his era of not speaking to the media, this also has footage taken from Satanis.
As part of the Cult Crime Impact Network, Pazder got into business working with police groups and consulting on Satanic ritual abuse, while lawyers used his book while doing cases, and social workers used Michelle Remembers as their training manual.
According to NPR host Ari Shapiro, “One reason these fictions were so appealing was that they gave people a sense of purpose. They had a mission – to defend the innocent.”
This is what’s happening today. It’s why trans people are grooming children, why Democrats are eating babies, andwhy elections are being seen as conspiracies. Because the truth — the idea that things happen randomly for no reason — is less frightening than Satanism or Q-Anon.
Man, did I digress?
In Satan Wants You, filmmakers Sean Horlor and Steve J. Adams explore the history of Michelle Remembers and what most people don’t know, such as how Pazder and Smith left their families to be together and how the book was debunked. It would be one thing if their sessions led to a book and some press, but it would be another if they kicked off an entire movement.
The directors have stated: ““This is the first time that Michelle’s sister, Larry’s ex-wife, and Larry’s daughter have gone on the record to tell their side of this story. This was a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to combine all these stories together to reveal the true origins of the Satanic Panic and show how they connect to the Pizzagate and QAnon conspiracies of today.”
This movie must be seen, even if we’ve entered a time when feelings matter more than facts. But did facts ever matter?
This film also found an anonymous source sending Michelle’s actual tapes, which have never been heard until now.
I don’t discount that she went through some trauma. Yet, how many lives were destroyed along the way?
The sad fact is that no one has learned anything. That same refrain of “protecting the children” exists today. And yes, that’s a noble endeavor. But as someone who grew up in a town of 7,500 people that had more than one Catholic priest abusing children in the last fifteen years of my life, Often, the abuser is someone the abuser has known and trusts.
Just like a worldwide Satanic network — paging Maury Terry and The Family, a book that lost a court case to the Process Church over false claims — and a public ritual lasting 81 days seems complicated to swallow, so do all the claims of the far right today.
Back when I was a kid getting grilled over my slasher movie magazines and love of Danzig, I figured, “Well, someday soon, all of these close-minded people will die off, and we can get past racism, and we can learn how to be more open-minded together.” But now, everyone is close-minded. No one seemingly wants to learn. And this movie is a great teaching tool — it’s a must-see, an intense documentary worthy of rewatching — because it happened before, and yes, it’s going on all over again. The message may have shifted, but it’s still the message.
I’ll be really honest. This movie overwhelmed me, not just when I realized that Spider was in this, but when big parts of this movie were people sitting in rooms just talking as well as an extended sequence of people getting bags of candy and champagne in a sauna and then going to some kind of holiday party? Were their elves? Did I see that? And is that Miss Juicy from Little Women: Atlanta?
This movie does prove to me that black people watch Twin Peaks because at one point someone passes out and wakes up in the Black Lodge…I mean the Pink Room, a place outside of our world where a small person explains everything.
There are a lot of whiteboarding scenes in this movie where people stand around and whiteboard out ideas that are obviously stock art digitally placed onto a white screen because none of the things in these images say anything. This is very similar to anyone who whiteboards things, often these people want to show off what they know instead of working with you.
The drone saves the world but how? Does it kill people like the ones our last three Presidents have used? Why can’t I just forget that the world is on fire and the fact that my blood pressure is way up and just watch a dumb Christmas movie? I woke up last night and kept testing myself last night, over and over for more than 90 minutes, getting readings high and readings normal and not sure what to believe while the mania of anxiety took over my entire life.
Where are the elves when I need them?
Anyways, this movie feels like the kind of stage play that they used to advertise on late night TV with actors I had never seen as a kid outside of bit parts on 227 and Amen. I mean that as the highest of compliments. There are moments that made me laugh even if so much of it just barraged me into a coma of Christmas.
Directed and written by Stewart Thorndike, this is about Leah (Gaby Hoffman) and her girlfriend June (Ingrid Jungermann) have fallen in love with a New York City apartment building and that love — just like whatever once existed between them — seems to fade after the sudden death of their young daughter Lyle (Eleanor Hopkins). Soon, Leah is nearly left to deal with her rush of paranoid feelings, particularly her belief that the landlady Karen (Rebecca Street) is behind multiple child sacrifices. Karen also pretends to be pregnant, even if she’s much too old for it.
Coming after Rosemary’s Baby but before the Q-Anon and Pizzagate stories of Democrats drinking the blood of babies — even if that came from a long tradition of antisemitic stories — and five years before the occult-rich The Scary of Sixty First, And hey — there’s Michael Che!
This movie is 65 minutes long, a length that all movies should aim for. That doesn’t mean that this isn’t a slow burn that gets agonizing and shows you that Gaby Hoffman is a long way from Uncle Buck.
I have had times in my life where my belief that everyone is out to get me has been proven correct and this movie reminded me of the sheer rush of sweat and terror when people are unmasked.
Is it easier to accept that a Satanic cult is all around you than the fact that your child has died as the result of a whim of fate? Your answer to this question will tell you how much you understand the crutch that conspiracy has become.
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