Banned (1989)

... aka: Banned: The Return of Teddy Homicide

Directed by:

Roberta Findlay

Findlay's stint in the dregs of New York exploitation was a pretty fascinating one. Not that the films were always that good, but what other woman at the time directed, wrote, produced, shot, lit, edited, did music and sound, operated the camera, composed scores, acted and had a hand in distributing their own films? I can't think of any. Findlay's career can basically be broken down into three distinct phases. The 60s saw lots of gritty soft-core / "roughie" films, often shot in black-and-white, sometimes quite interesting (at least by the low standards of that genre) and usually made in conjunction with her then-husband, Michael. That lasted until the two separated in the early 70s. Starting in 1974, Findlay began churning out dozens of hardcore sex films and racked up some unique credits there as well. When cheaply-shot porn videos began to dominate the adult market the following decade, she made the switch to R-rated horror and capped off her career with a string of low budget films that were well-distributed and profitable on home video. The last thing on anyone's mind was creating high art. It was all about making a quick buck by riding current trends. Once the money stopped rolling in, Roberta stopped making movies and settled into another line of work. It was just that simple.

Banned is the film that officially ended Findlay's two-and-a-half-decade long filmmaking career. She has referred to it as "garbage," "unreleasable" and "terrible" in various interviews and claims she was rushed into making it, had to settle for a subpar screenplay ("The script was awful!") and was uncomfortable with the subject matter. Not that being merely bad ever stopped something from making money in the past, but this was not only bad but also a difficult sell and distributors passed on it. Ads were run in Variety, but it was soon shelved and completely forgotten about. Findlay and her producing partner, Walter E. Sear, lost around 80K of their own money on the project, which prompted them both to throw in the towel and focus their energies elsewhere. It then sat unreleased for over 30 years (!) which automatically made the entire thing more enticing to cult movie aficionados, especially as people became more interested in Findlay's career.

Back in 1978, untalented, purple-haired Aussie (?) punk rocker Teddy Homicide (Neville Wells) went crazy, whipped out a machine gun, killed an entire studio full of engineers, musicians and groupies (plus a pizza delivery man) then ended it all by drowning himself in a toilet. Cut to present day, when a struggling, very confused-sounding NYC jazz / prog rock fusion band (!) called Banned is out performing for spare change on 42nd Street. Consisting of guitarist / Berkeley graduate Kent Travis (Dan Erickson), keyboardist / performance artist Chelsea Fontaine (Brent Trish Whitney), bassist and military vet Willie Jeffries (Roger Coleman) and former roadie turned drummer Serge (Fred Cabral), everyone involved is getting impatient waiting for their big break. After all, they've still got bills to pay, and their last attempt at a breakthrough album - "Stand and Deliver" - failed to do either and bombed.

Willie comes up with a possible solution to turn things around. His brother has recently purchased an old recording studio called Impulse. The band can work there to test out the soundproofing before the studio officially opens, and use the space to make another album plus gain some much needed publicity in the process. Publicity you say? Yes, Impulse was the site of the 1970s punk massacre, so this could boast of being the first album recorded there since.

Sid Biesenthal (Allen Lieb), executive from Banned's label Broken Records, thinks Kent is bringing the entire group down because of his insistence on being artsy and original over palatable and commercial. Willie's uncle, studio producer Rod Jeffries (Glen Mitchell), is assigned the difficult task of helping Banned come up with their first hit single and reigning in Kent's pretentious impulses. However, that plan goes out the window after Kent starts hearing voices coming from the toilet bowl and then finds himself possessed by the spirit of Teddy Homicide. Somehow that injects some much-needed appeal into the band despite them actually sounding even worse than they did before.

The new Kent acts in a kind of schizo manner where he's his usual mild-mannered pacifist self part of the time and the manic, screaming, giggling, hard-partying trouble-maker Teddy the rest of it. On stage, he goes into a fit, screaming profanities at the audience, which makes the place go wild and instantly turns on all of the ladies in the crowd. Though he's dating painter Rachel Fesperman (Amy Brentano), his newfound loss of inhibitions also means he feels free to make a move on Chelsea, who he's always had a crush on. When he takes her to lunch at an outdoor café, a group of Lebanese terrorists show up and start shooting everyone until Kent goes and gives them a pep talk, sending them over to Tavern on the Green instead (!)

This is mostly an obnoxious collection of "quirky" pseudo-comic scenes; a couple mildly amusing, most excruciating. The worst bit is when Kent takes his girlfriend home to visit his parents and his drunken, psychotic dad goes on a screaming rant that feels like it lasts an hour. The old Jewish record exec snorts some white powder made from "beef tissue" (?!) and periodically transforms into a muscular black man (Cecil Howsen). Once the Teddy persona starts fully taking over, Kent starts "terrorizing" Rachel by trashing their apartment, huffing chemicals, insisting on exhausting sex marathons and forcing her to go dancing late at night after she's had a long work day. The short, balding drummer is somehow irresistible to women and manages to bed half the female cast, including studio assistant Debbie (Jacqueline Price) and even Kent's teenage sister, Eileen (Cheryl Hendricks).

Rachel's gay brother Percival (Adam Fried) is a seminary school dropout turned plumber turned flamboyant TV evangelist who shows up at the end armed with a toilet plunger and Drano for the incredibly lame "exorcism" finale. There are also a few recurring gags like our protagonist repeatedly falling into open manholes, cops showing up a decade late to investigate crimes and a seemingly endless chase scene through Central Park with machine guns and a rocket launcher (!) While a lot of this is obviously strange, it's almost never funny.

Watching this, I felt truly bad for lead actor Erickson, who was previously seen in Findlay's dull and near-bloodless (despite the title) slasher Blood Sisters (1987), along with Brentano. He puts a lot of energy and enthusiasm into his performance, and is likeable and appealing when he gets to act normal, but is consistently undermined by terrible dialogue. Whitney also displays some genuine charisma as the keyboard player but she disappears from most of the last third of the film after a dispute with her possessed band mate. The film's failures are certainly not for lack of trying from the cast, though nearly everyone comes off poorly because they're asked to constantly mug for the cameras and wildly overact as if that's automatically going to be amusing. It's not. It's simply annoying and borderline intolerable.

There are production issues, especially with the editing and the audio, and though this was marketed as a horror-comedy, and utilizes many horror film tropes, the horror is almost nonexistent here. However, belying the director's past work in sexploitation, there's plentiful topless nudity from nearly all of the female cast, including a young Debbie Rochon in a minor early role as one of the groupies. Another sleazy touch is the drummer's bedroom, which is decorated with posters for Findlay porn films like Private School Girls and Shauna: Every Man's Fantasy.

I've read several differing accounts about this film's belated release. To my knowledge, Findlay never publicly expressed anything but contempt for the project and claims to have never wanted to release it, but that seems a little bit suspect considering she personally held on to a print of it for nearly three decades. I suppose she finally just stopped caring about potential embarrassment and made what little she could from this disaster. I've also read that, supposedly, Media Blasters had purchased the film from Findlay herself way back in the early 2010s. That's also a bit odd considering they didn't bother officially releasing it to Blu-ray until 2022. I'm sure there's an interesting story or two to tell here that I'm unaware of. Definitely not worth the wait in any case.

★1/2

Munchies (1987)

Directed by:

Bettina (Tina) Hirsch

Once the Joe Dante-directed, Steven Spielberg-produced Gremlins took the box office by storm in 1984, the usual suspects were standing by waiting to cash in. First, there was producer Charles Band, who gave us GHOULIES (1985), which placed its mini-monsters into a Satanism plot almost as an afterthought, though they'd move more center stage in the sequels. Not content with that, Band also produced TROLL (1986) and has since spent most of the rest of his career making silly movies featuring diminutive killer dolls, monsters, mutants, gingerbread cookies, bongs and the like. Unlike most of the rest of these, CRITTERS (1986) and The Gate (1987) were major studio wide releases that did well in theaters and on home video and spawned sequels. There were plenty of cheaper, lower-grade films, as well, including Hobgoblins (1987), ELVES (1990) and Beasties (1991), plus a number of films usually left completely off of these lists because they're not American, like the Japanese GAKIDAMA (1985). In addition to that, you have dozens of movies that may not have been entirely centered around mini-monsters but still prominently featured them, like Spookies (1986), ROCK 'N' ROLL NIGHTMARE (1987) and SORORITY BABES IN THE SLIMEBALL BOWL-O-RAMA (1988). I really should try to make a definitive list of these one day!

Not be left out, because he's never left out, Roger Corman produced this particular knock-off. As was customary with him, he gave an up-and-coming new talent (ironically in this case, the editor of Gremlins) their first chance to direct a feature. And, as was also common for Corman, that person was a female. Corman is sometimes accused of being sexist because he insisted the exploitation films he backed include female nudity, but I've always found that criticism utter bullshit. This man was one of the only producers back then actually giving women the chance to direct. The nudity was included to sell certain genre films to drive-ins and (later) the cable and video markets but his critics seldom point out the he also produced plenty of films that featured no nudity or gore. This one, for instance, contains neither and happens to be rated PG. Not that this is in any way better than the ones that do. Quite the contrary!

Archaeologist Simon Watterman (Harvey Korman) and his alarmingly unfunny aspiring stand-up comedian son Paul (Charles Stratton) are exploring some ancient Incan ruins in Peru. Simon's there because of a theory he has that Machu Picchu had been secretly used as a control tower for alien spaceships (?!) While exploring a tomb, the two discover a pool of green glowing liquid plus a furry, smart, talkative and friendly little creature. After Paul gives it a chocolate bar, it willingly crawls into his duffel bag. They then fly back to the U. S. (see what happens if you try to get a munchie through airport security these days) and head back home to the desert town of Sweetwater. Simon goes away to a conference, entrusting Paul and his girlfriend Cindy (Nadine Van der Velde, who's also in Critters) with the creature. They feed it pork rinds, give it a Playboy Magazine to read, name him Arnold Ziffel (after the pig on Green Acres) and then shirk their responsibilities and retreat to the bedroom for some under-the-covers "sleazy teenage sex," which somehow includes a plastic laser gun and a giant inflatable hammer.

Living right next door is Simon's evil brother Cecil (also played by Korman, wearing a black afro wig), who spies on them with a telescope and has their home bugged (!) so he can listen in to all of their conversations. Even though Cecil is an entrepreneur who owns about 100 different businesses, he's desperate for his brother to sell him his property so he has a place to store 2,000 barrels of "America's greatest natural resource;" toxic waste. After overhearing a conversation about the creature, Cecil and "Dude" (Jon Stafford), his annoying, hacky sack-obsessed "burnt-out Santa Cruz Dead Head" stepson, break in and kidnap Arnold. "Dude" is left to babysit, which ends in him shooting the alien with a shotgun and cutting it in two with a knife (don't ask). What's left of Arnold then regenerates into another Arnold plus three more creatures, which don't quite possess the pleasant temperament of their predecessor. They do however come equipped with a steady stream of God awful one-liners.

After killing "Dude" by blasting Grateful Dead music through his headphones (?), the "munchies" steal his car, smoke cigarettes, blow an old woman's car up and flip off a bunch of bikers after running them off the road. After going after a couple of teen girls swimming in a lake, they invade an ice cream parlor run by Robert Picardo (who seriously seems out to lunch here) and Wendy Schall. From there it's off to the grand opening of "the world's first 36 hole miniature golf course," where they float around on balloons, go fishing, drink wine coolers, dress up as pirates and have a swordfight, pelt people with golf balls and chase all of the customers away. They ransack a video store (where we see posters for other Corman productions like Barbarian Queen and TNT Jackson) and cause other problems as Paul and Cindy, as well as Cecil, his airhead Tammy Faye-esque wife Melvis (Alix Elias) and a couple of cops, search for them.

I vividly remember this movie from my childhood and, like most kids my age, the VHS box featuring a munchie sipping a beer while looking up a young woman's dress was pretty much an insta-rent. Back then, I seriously doubt I noticed much else of what was going on here aside from the munchie action and the juvenile gags. However, looking at this through adult eyes I can now see this what for it truly is: A wannabe satire mocking faux patriotism and our self-serving capitalist society. In that regard, this is much more in the spirit of Gremlins, which found much of its humor turning a picture postcard small town into a battle zone, than any of the other rip-offs, which were perfectly content merely showing the creatures attacking and killing people.

Cecil's idea of recycling includes re-purposing toxic waste, unwanted meat scraps, asbestos (!) and Agent Orange (!!) into popular "all natural" snack foods. He fancies himself the poster boy for U. S. patriotism yet sells his "space chewie stix" to "the Russian Communauts" because NASA rejected him and "with the Commies, you just gotta cut 'em in for a percentage." Cecil also dabbles in political matters, derides special interest groups who threaten to slow industrialization and is a spokesman for the "Better Tomorrow Through Malls Committee." After Cindy watches one of Cecil's commercials, she smirks, "What a sleaze. I'm surprised he's not in Washington."

There's also a ridiculously obnoxious, pushy and USA-gushing young deputy (Charlie Phillips) who's obsessed with a potential "Commie takeover" by "Russkie spies." And there's an equally obnoxious bully of a restaurant manager who pushes around and belittles his all-dwarf kitchen staff. When one character points out the effects of pollution, another accuses her of spouting "anti-nuke propaganda." If you look at the art direction, from the oblivious Melvis' tacky pink palace to American flags being stuck in every nook and cranny of the film, you realize that's not a coincidence. And it's also no coincidence that most of the ignorant male characters have this exaggerated macho swagger about them nor an accident that the munchies choose a Clint Eastwood cowboy display to send flying through a video store window. I don't feel I'm exaggerating at all when I say this is by far the most ambitious of the Gremlins copies. There's a vein of social commentary running throughout this entire film, including making the munchies' entire instant gratification-based existence consist of junk food, booze, smokes and sex. They're like our own excesses being turned against us.

Sadly, none of the above makes this a good film. Just as the path to hell is paved with good intentions, the path to failed satire is paved with films that like to point out all of societies ills just for the sake of doing so and then stubbornly refusing to do anything of interest with the very things they've just brought to our attention. The dialogue is so bad that even seasoned comedians like Korman can't make their lines work and filling the film almost entirely with over-the-top cartoon characters is off-putting in the extreme. Instead of laughing at these people, we merely want to see them get killed as soon as humanly possible... and the movie even robs of that small pleasure!

There's also a mean-spirited streak that's at odds with how cutesy, self-aware (including multiple references to both Gremlins and E.T.) and "quirky" this film believes it is. The Cecil character degrades, slaps, punches, kicks, strangles and puts a gun to the head of his adopted son in scenes that I think are supposed to be funny but are merely depressing to sit through. As for why this couple even bothered to adopt him in the first place? Well, the mother coos, "I guess I just felt sorry for him cause he's so ugly and stupid" in her shrill voice. 

And then there are the scenes of violence directed toward the docile-at-first creature, like people slapping it, hitting it and picking it up and throwing it against a wall, which I think are also supposed to be funny. Yes, I know this is a rubber puppet we're talking about here. I just don't find allusions to animal abuse being used for cheap laughs particularly amusing and I doubt a single person who watched Gremlins sat there wanting to see Gizmo getting beaten up and mistreated prior to him spawning creatures. My issue is not with this content per se, it's with the fact the people who made this thought it was funny.

There's not much nice to say about the Robert Short-designed monsters either. They're utterly lifeless and personality-free and lack the mobility and facial expressions needed to make them look like anything other than rubber dolls getting yanked around by a string or thrown into frame by a probably embarrassed and likely-unpaid production assistant. I can't even bring myself to refer to these things as puppets as you can at least stick your hand up a puppet's ass and make it move in a more convincing manner than these things ever do.

Aside from co-directing a documentary about Vietnam, this was the only feature Hirsch ever directed. Probably (correctly) sensing her true talents lied elsewhere, she returned to editing; becoming the first female president of the American Cinema Editors (ACE) Association in 2000 and winning their Career Achievement Award in 2020. Prior to making this, she had edited a good number of other Corman films, including hits like Big Bad Mama (1974) and Death Race 2000 (1975). The cast also includes Ellen Albertini Dow, Lori Birdsong (Blood Salvage) and a completely wasted Paul Bartel, who shows up for the final scene and only has a couple of lines of dialogue.

After its limited theatrical run from Concorde, this was ushered out onto home video by MGM / UA. It also frequently played on cable TV for years and was popular enough to spawn two "sequels." Instead of taking the horror-comedy route the original does, Munchie (1991) and Munchie Strikes Back (1994) were unrelated Jim Wynorski kiddie movies featuring a different-looking monster voiced by Dom DeLuise. There was a DVD release from New Concorde Home Entertainment in 2004, followed by a 2018 Blu-ray release from Scream Factory.

★1/2