Selected to screen at the 2024 HollyShorts Film Festival, director Christopher Greenslate’s “Bananahead” is an unnerving and well told tale about legacy and impostor syndrome. It’s very much a horror movie, but it’s also a very stark movie about hitting a bar that someone previously left and a lot of what they can leave behind after they have gone. Sally Maersk is a stunner in the role as Andi Sanger, a young performer who gives herself the inherent pressure of taking on a role in the adaptation in her mom’s best selling book “Bananahead.”
Author Archives: Felix Vasquez
The Darkside of Society (2024) [Popcorn Frights 2024]
There’s nothing I love more than a documentary about the conception of one of the most notorious cult classics ever made. Brian Yuzna’s 1989 horror satire is a gross, vile look at the amorality of the affluent. What I don’t like is a documentary that paints itself as a look at the making of a movie and is in reality conspiracy claptrap garbage sexual abuse, ritual child abuse, and sexual violence that has about two percent to do with Brian Yuzna’s movie.
Cuckoo (2024)
If you wanted something original in 2024 then by gum “Cuckoo” is one of the most original horror movies of the year. It’s so original that it works to the detriment of what Tilman Singer is trying to accomplish as a statement about bodily autonomy. Much as I wanted to love “Cuckoo,” Tilman’s mix of sub-genres watches like a lazy nonsensical riff on Cronenberg’s early films by a lazy film student with none of Cronenberg’s daring or creativity. It just literally seems to throw things at the wall to see if it sticks, as many have expressed.
And what doesn’t work just lingers like a festering trail of bread crumbles leading in to this hang nail of nonsense.
American Daydream (2024)
Where is the American dream bred? In the heart or in the head? Director-Writer Ziyu Luo’s “American Daydream” is a classic ode to the idea of the American dream and our pursuit of it. Is the “American Dream” an unreachable goal, or something that we each have within us, personally? Recently having its world premiere at the HollyShorts Film Festival, “American Daydream” is a brilliant beautiful short drama comedy that explores ideas about immigration, assimilation and Americanization.
Five Favorite Channing Tatum Cameos
Channing Tatum originally began his career being pegged as the dreamy bad boy who was mostly in romance movies. Over the course of his career, he’s also garnered an admirable sense of self-awareness never being afraid to poke fun at himself thus setting himself up as one of the big-time actors who love to make cameos in random movies. Tatum has popped up in many movies over the last ten years, including “Deadpool & Wolverine.”
Whether you like him or not, Tatum has offered up some surprising cameos over the years, here are my favorites.
There’s A Zombie Outside (2024) [Popcorn Frights 2024]
It should go without saying that I really wanted to love Michael Varrati’s “There’s a Zombie Outside”; somewhere deep down there’s a great film thar doesn’t pitch itself as one thing and is really something else. What I initially assumed was some kind of supernatural descent in to horror transforms in to what is basically “Adaptation” but for the horror sect. It’s an eighty minute horror themed drama about impostor syndrome, and trying to complete a product of love before it begins consuming our lives.
Rani DeMuth, Director of “And Now I Lay Me Down”
Now on the festival circuit, “And Now I Lay Me Down” is a stellar drama comedy starring Jane Kaczmarek of “Malcolm in the Middle” fame. The great short is directed by Rani DeMuth a charming and clever filmmaker and storyteller who took time out to discuss her process making the movie and what it was like working with an actress of Kaczmarek’s caliber. Look out for “And Now I Lay Me Down.”