9 - The Beginning and the End: Transitioning Careers and Roberta Findlay’s Banned (1989)

Summary

Marking the end of a rollercoaster and frequently controversial career straddling exploitation cinema, hardcore pornography, and horror, Roberta Findlay’s long-unreleased final film Banned (1989) has been the subject of dedicated fan speculation. After failing to gain distribution for the film, which was intended to profit from a trend for wild youth-oriented comedies on cable television, Findlay effectively quit filmmaking and returned professionally to the subject she studied at university—music—through her work at the legendary esteemed Sear Sound studio at 353 West 48th Street in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen (founded by and named after Findlay’s long-term partner and collaborator, Walter Sear).

From this perspective, the little-seen Banned can be viewed as both the end of Findlay’s film career, while simultaneously also flagging a transition to a second career, which at the time of writing she currently maintains. With much of Banned itself set in a recording studio, the film follows the antics of a milquetoast middle-class rock guitarist and vocalist who becomes possessed by the spirit of a dead killer punk rocker via a haunted toilet. With his middle-of-theroad jazz fusion group called Banned (whose name is a pun intended to play on its similarity to the word “band,” and also connotations of the forbidden or censored), the largely insufferable Kent (Dan Erickson) is driven by almost naive ambitions of success. A last shot of hope comes in the shape of cheap recording time at a newly reopened music studio that was the site of a fatal massacre a decade earlier at the hands of punk rock singer Teddy Homicide (Neville Wells), lead singer of the band Rotting Filth, who drowned himself in the studio’s bathroom straight after. Unfortunately for Kent, Teddy’s spirit has lain dormant in the toilet, possessing the young man while he relieves himself and prompting his transition into an equally non-conforming punk rock antihero, escalating the band’s fame but leaving a stream of violence and other broadly shabby behaviors in his wake.

While in its own way just as audacious as Findlay’s more notorious works, Banned is not merely what is to date a sadly unseen finale to a complex and fascinating film career, but—more optimistically—it also bookends her career with a return to her first passion: music.