All but lost, the unreleased Banned represents the final film of cult New York director Roberta Findlay (Tenement). Beholden to no genre and without an internal logic to call its own, the movie is utterly strange even for her.

Ostensibly, it’s about the ghost of Sid Vicious-esque punk rocker Teddy Homicide (Neville Wells), he of Rotten Filth. While laying tracks at Impulse Studios, he suddenly snaps, mows everyone down with a machine gun, and then drowns himself in the toilet. His soul remains in the commode for 10 years, until the band Banned (get it?) scrounges together enough cash to cut an album there, and jazz guitarist Kent (Dan Erickson from Mrs. Findlay’s Blood Sisters) becomes possessed when sprayed with toilet water. It happens.

Findlay only marginally pursues that angle; it’s secondary to everything else, which can be broken into three major categories:
1. automatic weapons — Guns are handled by many characters throughout. Whether incidentally or in the hands of a Middle Eastern terrorist trio, they’re played for laughs, no matter how many lives are snuffed out. Ditto Banned‘s climax of Kent/Teddy being chased through Central Park with a rocket launcher.
2. groupie sex — Banned’s drummer, Serge (Fred Cabral), balls anything with a cervix. He never finishes, because copulation is interrupted by the ringing of an alarm clock, which he then hurls against the wall. Its broken parts fall into a pile of so many, it’s a wonder Serge doesn’t have the HIV. Among the women who strip nude is D-list scream queen Debbie Rochon (Santa Claws), in only her sixth credit of (at press time) 225.
3. slapstick comedy — Or “attempts at,” to get technical. Characters plunge into open manholes, and if it’s not funny the first time (and it’s not), Findlay hopes it will be the third (nope). Similarly, when Serge lapses into a religious rant, his pals press a surge protector labeled “Serge Suppressor” to his chest; Findlay draws attention to the pun thrice just to make sure you won’t miss it. You won’t, but you’ll groan instead of guffaw.

Depicted twice, the weirdest gag has Broken Records’ owner — an old, short, round Jewish man — snort lines of “beef adrenal tissue,” thereby turning him into a young, tall, muscular African-American hulk à la Kentucky Fried Movie‘s Big Jim Slade.

Almost as an afterthought, Kent is exorcised by a preacher who moonlights as a plumber. Banned is worth about an equal amount of contemplation; while certainly not boring, its intent and execution are perplexing. Erickson bothers to give an actual performance, but everyone else — to borrow a line from the movie — can “go fuck a coconut.” —Rod Lott

Harmony Korine’s Spring Breakers is both a crime film and a crime against film. The critical adoration for it puzzles me, for the indie is about as deep as the puddle of urine its largely vapid quartet squats to make on the pavement in broad daylight.

Four girlfriends are anxious to flee college for Florida for spring break, but don’t have enough cash between them for even one night’s stay (yet somehow, they are consistently able to afford cocaine). Problem solved: Rob a diner using squirt guns and sledgehammers, and it’s par-tay time! The young ladies then imbibe and engage in all sorts of 24/7 debauchery — always in their color-coordinated bikinis, presumably hand-picked to match Korine’s Sour Skittles palette — until cops bust up the fun. They’re bailed out of jail by Alien (James Franco, Oz the Great and Powerful), a white, cornrowed rapper/dealer with a fox’s sly smile … if foxes sported enough gangsta grills to nauseate four out of five dentists.

The skeevy Alien leads the ladies further down a slippery slope, headfirst into his trumped-up fantasy world of loaded machine guns and hot-tub threesomes and (I assume) vicious STDs. Halfway through, the God-fearing good girl named, of course, Faith (Selena Gomez, former Disney Channel princess of Wizards of Waverly Place) decides she’s had enough and flees. Viewers may pray they could go with her.

It’s not that I find Spring Breakers‘ content offensive — a recurring theme involves pornographically sucking everything from Rainbow Popsicles to gun barrels — but what I do find offensive is how empty that content is. It serves nothing but itself. Flirting with the mainstream, provocateur Korine (Gummo) is not framing his flimsy story as a morality tale; his leering camera is too busy focusing on the crotches of women whose faces are cropped purposely out-of-frame, reducing them to mere holes.

Franco’s on another level than the female cast (Gomez, Ashley Benson of TV’s Pretty Little Liars, Sucker Punch-er Vanessa Hudgens and Korine’s wife, Rachel), but his performance is hardly a saving grace when the movie revels in maddening repetition. One such instance is the oft-voiced rallying cry of “Spring break forever, bitches! Spring break forever!” The trip certainly feels endless. —Rod Lott

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Here’s a textbook example of a true exploitation film: an on-the-cheap word of warning on any given “social ill” (in this case, racism) that engages in the very subject it claims to decry. The opening three minutes of My Baby Is Black!, although far from politically correct, compose its highlight — a birthing sequence culminating in the bold, brazen exclamation of the title.

The rest of the black-and-white (pun not intended) film is not as in-your-face. In fact, it’s a somber, limply acted, robot-dubbed, French-lensed, melodramatic seriotragedy about a snowy-white Parisian girl named Françoise (Françoise Giret) attracted to a visiting, handsome African-American med student named Daniel (Gordon Heath, Animal Farm).

Together, they hold hands, laugh hysterically at nothing, express their love in voice-over and have lots of unprotected sex. They don’t have conversations per se; they speak in despair-drenched soliloquies so serious, you’d think they’re aching to set them to iambic pentameter.

As the title tells, Françoise gets preggers, prompting her father to attempt coercing her into an abortion, which he justifies by saying, “It is not a sin to get rid of a dirty stain.” The most racist segment arrives in a bizarre moment of supposed comic relief when a black child tells the police about asking the butcher for some ham, only to be smeared with lard and shoved into the fridge. The butcher’s reply: “I was only joking.”

My Baby Is Black! is full of skewed analogies, particularly from the academic voice of reason (Aram Stephan, Bedtime Story), who reasons, “Racism is like a lot of ants. … All ants must be trampled.” Daniel, however, argues, “I can’t agree with what you’re saying, professor. I like ants very much.” That’s not helping the cause, Daniel. —Rod Lott

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Satan in High Heels‘ titular devil isn’t really Satan; it’s just that, in 1962 (as in 2013), putting the C-word in a title was verboten.

And Stacey Kane (former pin-up girl Meg Myles) is certainly that. At the start, she’s a burlesque dancer for a two-bit carnival that can’t pay her what her 42-24-36 frame is worth. Salvation of sorts arrives in the form of her twitchy, supposedly sober, no-good ex-husband and his fistful of cash. She takes the latter and leaves the former waiting in her trailer, thinking she’s gone to gather her things so they can run off together. Whatta sap!

Instead, Stacey takes her smoky (and smoker’s) voice to a New York club where she can perform with her chords, not her cans. And this is all before the opening credits! Upon arrival at said club, she wows its manager, Pepe (Grayson Hall, Dr. Julia Hoffman of TV’s Dark Shadows), with her pipes. And with her pulchritude, she also wows the club’s owner (Mike Keene, Violent Midnight) … and the owner’s son (Robert Yuro, The Shakiest Gun in the West). Not a problem; she can screw (over) both.

If it wasn’t director Jerald Intrator’s intent to shoot Satan in Bounce-O-Vision, he sure lucked out. (But since he also helmed Striporama, I’m guessing it was planned.) He has no discernible style, letting Myles’ figure do much of the work. Her tired face suits her character well, showing lots of mileage. While she’s not a great actress, she belts well; her most memorable musical number is singing “The Female of the Species,” all while clad in a leather get-up — complete with riding crop — that would satisfy many a fetishist.

Speaking of, the moral of the story seems to be that guys will put up with an awful lot for access to a killer pair of breasts. This is true. —Rod Lott

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With his bald head and flaring nostrils, the world-renowned Dr. Henry J. Heimlich looks like Sid Caesar on a bender and sounds like Christopher Walken, eerie phrasing and all. Thus, it’s tough to take him as competent, especially when in the first scene, he straddles a woman lying on the floor, pushes on her chest and calls it “an act of love.”

I don’t care if he did create the life-saving Heimlich Maneuver; in Dr. Heimlich’s Home First-Aid Video, he is simultaneously scary and dubious. If a person’s choking, there’s Henry, talking about pressure on the diaphragm, and coming up from behind to wrap his slimy tentacles around some innocent young woman.

The other people in this made-for-VHS instructional video are even stranger. In the section on wood splinters, some wimp dumps his load of logs as if he’d just had a massive coronary. On animal bites, some simpleton prods the face of a German shepherd with a twig. A toddler is shown gnawing away on an electric cord.

The tape gets grislier as it goes on, with shots of severely blistered arms, as well as a prodigious flow of blood from a little girl’s knee; the latter proves quite touching, as her mother consoles her: “See the blood, dear? See how it flows?” Taking the proverbial cake, however, is the oaf who somehow manages to drop an open container of drain cleaner onto his face. Aaaiiieeeee!

Henry ends his First-Aid Video by telling the viewer not to pick his or her nose. —Rod Lott

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