If (like me) you grew up on MTV, you’re probably familiar with VH1’s Behind the Music. Each episode of the show focused on a single band or musician and followed a fairly consistent cookie-cutter pattern. Each show covered the artist’s childhood, their early days as a performer, their big break, their personal demons, and where they are today (dead or alive). But one other thing every episode of Behind the Music had in common was that they all featured musicians people had heard of.

That hurdle for Last Fast Ride: The Life, Love and Death of a Punk Goddess is a steep one to overcome. No one, except those well-steeped in obscure 90s punk rock, will know who Marian Anderson was. (I sure didn’t.) Turns out, she was the lead singer of a California-based punk band known as the Insaints, who put out a single 7″ split (album) in 1993. Even if you wre into punk rock and had been living in the area at the time, there’s a good chance you could have blinked and missed them.

Marian’s story is not a happy one. The oldest of several girls, she was physically and sexually abused by her father as a young child. She abused drugs and alcohol, was diagnosed with multiple mental illnesses, attempted suicide “at least twenty times,” gave her daughter up for adoption, and worked as a dominatrix in the sex industry. In addition to all of those things, she also founded and performed in several punk rock bands, the biggest of which was the aforementioned Insaints.

The Insaints weren’t known for being particularly good as much as they were known for having a lead singer (Anderson) who would perform without a top on. And later, without a bottom on either. Anderson began inviting fellow sex artists on stage to perform during Insaints shows, often resulting in a literal orgy as the band was forced to play on and pretend everyone was there for the music. Anderson’s claim to fame, if she has one, was that she was arrested in 1993 and charged with three counts of lewd and lascivious behavior, one of which involved a banana. Anderson fought the charges in court claiming freedom of speech and artistic expression. After a year, she was acquitted of all charges. Shortly after that, the band broke up.

Last Fast Ride is narrated by Henry Rollins (which immediately gives it street cred) and contains interviews with established band members from The Offspring and Rancid, but some of the interviews add up to little more than “yup, we knew her.” A few of Anderson’s old band mates also testify that she was a brilliant person with a gentle soul, but as for us, the audience, we’re mostly treated to videos of her screaming incoherently on stage.

Other than Anderson’s sister, the most featured interview subject is her ex-girlfriend, Danielle Santos Bernal. Bernal and Anderson shared a love/hate relationship in which they made out a lot and then tried to stab each other with knives a lot. If you thought Anderson was going to settle down and become a boring housewife, you missed the part about the banana.

Anderson died of a heroin overdose in 2001 at the age of 33. Six months later, her father killed himself. It’s a depressing but somehow fitting ending to a depressing story.

Just before the closing credits roll, as a guy with a giant mohawk, leather jacket, eye liner and acoustic guitar plays a sappy song, I asked myself why I sat through this documentary. The filmmakers did a fantastic jpb of making Anderson’s life seem tragic, but not much in the way of making us care about her. With no way to make her relatable to the audience, the whole thing becomes, “we knew this chick back in the day; here’s her sad story.” There were lots of hints of things the filmmakers could have pursued — her work in the sex industry, her drug abuse, her mental illness — but none of those get much screen time. Instead, the best we get is “she stuck a banana up her hoo-hah on stage in the name of the First Amendment.” It’s a lot like defending Nazis or funeral protesters; even if they have the right to say what they want, it still doesn’t make them likable people.

If you’re looking for a depressing story about a troubled woman, Last Fast Ride is for you. If nothing else, it’ll make you want to go to the nearest coffee house and hug the smelliest person in the place.

The Double McGuffin begins with a voice over by Orson Welles (of all people) explaining to the audience what a McGuffin is. For the uninitiated, a McGuffin, a term popularized by Alfred Hitchcock, is an item in a book or movie that drives the plot forward that isn’t particularly intrinsic to the story. The necklace in Titanic, the glowing case from Pulp Fiction, and the Maltese Falcon itself are all classic examples. The voice over ends with an ominous warning that “most stories only have one McGuffin.” It’s a strange way to introduce a teen mystery, and an odd thing to name a movie. It would be like calling Star Wars “Green Screen Excitement,” or naming a novel “Murder Mystery.” It’s a literary term that has nothing to do with the on screen world.

But, it’s accurate. The film focuses on a group of (mostly) boys at a local boarding school. One’s black, one’s a cowboy, one’s a shrimp with an attitude, one’s a nerd, and one doesn’t do or say much of anything. The lone girl of the pack is the sole writer, photographer, and editor of the school newspaper. By chance the kids discover a briefcase full of cash and a dead body out in the woods, which pulls them into a deeper murder mystery.

The briefcase belongs to a mysterious foreigner named Mr. Firat (Ernest Borgnine), whom the kids suspect is planning to murder someone. The kids do their best to convince Police Chief Talasek (George Kennedy) with their evidence, but their history of telling tall tales to the chief makes it difficult for him to believe them — combined with every cliche in the book (“But I swear, officer, the body was right here!”)

With no help from “the man”, the kids are on their own to figure out who these men are, and who they plan to assassinate. With today’s technology (fingerprints, DNA, the internet) the case would have been cracked in twelve seconds, but it takes up the majority of the film. There’s a scene where Jody (a pre-Facts of Life Lisa Whelchel) takes spy pics and develops the film, another scene where the kids plant a walkie-talkie in the bad guys’ hotel room, and a third scene where the kids almost get busted while they wait for a computer to “turn on and process the megabytes.” Every grown up watching the film will ask why the kids didn’t contact their parents, a second police officer, or literally any other adult on the planet, but I don’t think adults were the original target audience for this film.

At least a few of the kids possess secret gadgets. It’s not really explained how they obtained them or who built them, but in their dorm rooms the kids have dart boards hidden behind panels, snacks hidden inside a globe, a phone connected to the dean’s extension, and even a built-in cooler hidden behind a false counter to stash cans of soda and beer. Most of these things are there so we will say “wow these kids are nifty” and don’t serve any purpose, although one of the kids does possess a Swiss Army Knife that allows him to pick any lock presented in the film. If these kids had more personality and back stories it could have been closer to The Goonies; instead, the radio stashed inside a wooden crate is just a radio, and the cooler hidden inside a counter is just an excuse for product placement.

But the kids are smart — smarter than any adult in the film, including the chief of police and trained assassins — and eventually they put a plot into place that saves the day. The whole movie has a “golly gee” feeling that is ruined by kids offering beer to other kids, a ten-year-old who looks at Playboy magazines, and at least a dozen cuss words. The end result is a movie for young kids that frankly isn’t suitable for them to watch. Adults will need a serious suspension of disbelief to enjoy the plot, starting with a team of hired hit men who can’t figure out a way to get rid of a bunch of kids that like to play alone out in the woods.

The Double McGuffin isn’t a bad film; it’s just flawed. It feels a lot like an episode of The Bloodhound Gang where each kid was magically granted the right to say three cuss words. It’s a light murder mystery, no harm no foul, but I have a tough time imagining teens today sitting through the film’s 1970s pacing.

As as for that dead body and briefcase full of money? They never come back, and now you know what a double McGuffin is.