For our readers, please introduce yourself.
I’m Christopher Greenslate, writer, director and producer of BANANAHEAD as well as a few other projects. It’s a funny thing trying to introduce oneself in an interview, but I’m someone who grew up in the punk and hardcore music scene and I’ve done a bunch of stuff. Toured with bands, put out records, published some work as a writer, but I’ve been working in film and television ever since I graduated from the American Film Institute back in 2016, and it finally seems like I’m hitting my stride. But I’m hopelessly optimistic, so who knows if that’s true?
The Night is Young (2024) [Popcorn Frights 2024]
It’s not many movies that begin feeling like some kind of goofy fun romantic comedy and transforms in to a war concerning vampires. Patrick Rea is up for the challenge of delivering on a movie with a firm tongue in cheek that’s mostly viewed through the lens of a modern video camera. I’m not too sure how vampires appear on screen but that’s for the artist to decide on terms when it comes to on screen vampires. “The Night Is Young” is a pretty good mixing of genres and sub-genres, centering itself on a woman who is on the hunt for a new girlfriend.
The Five Best Films I Saw in 1999
1999 was such a formative year for many. I was sixteen and experiencing new hobbies, and learning to love movies. And the internet was still in its infancy, transforming in to a fascinating but still mysterious technology. 1999 had much to offer in the way of the film world with studios releasing so many interesting and great films. With the 25 year marked in 2024, I spotlighted five of the best films I saw in 1999.
Bananahead (2024)
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.”
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.