Damn I wish I’d seen this movie in high school when I was putting together my personal compendium of punk media (nerdy as fuck, but whatever, let’s move forward).

Banned was Roberta Findlay’s (Tenement) last movie. You can kind of tell in that it’s surprisingly not mean-spirited, especially considering its director’s usual modus operandi. In fact Banned is downright cartoonish: no wave performance art is parodied, ghosts with vocoded voices come out of toilets, a twink televangelist/exorcist wearing a bicyclist’s…

This movie is absolutely deranged.

I’m not saying that in a negative way, to be clear. When I say deranged here I mean, it’s like Stephen Sayadian (Dr. Caligari, Café Flesh) collaborated with young Penelope Spheeris (Suburbia, Dudes) to write the script, then had Stewart Rafill (Tammy & The T-Rex, Mac & Me) have final editing privileges, then the trio proceeded to wrestle for control of directing. 

The whole movie is dreamlike unhinged nonsense. We have a punk (I guess) band who can’t…

This movie’s based on a novel. The novel in question is ugly, realistic, and a tiny bit gratuitous. This does luckily carry through to the adaptation. Almost nothing from the novel was left out in the scriptwriting process, probably because the original author wrote and codirected, but let’s back it up for a second. 

Here we have a gritty, realistic story about homeless gutter punk teenagers who have to deal with the awful things that homeless people often do. The…