If you are the parent or guardian of an impressionable adolescent DO NOT BRING HIM or PERMIT HIM TO SEE THIS MOTION PICTURE, proclaims the somewhat sexist “admonition” in the top corner of the lurid black-and-red poster for the legendary Blood Feast, the granddaddy of all splatter/slasher flicks. In the near half-century since its barnstorming debut in America’s drive-in circuit, literally thousands of imitators have followed in its sanguine candy-apple-red wake, treating its rigid formula as a cheap, schlocky Rosetta Stone. Through its gallons of stage grue, exploitation producer David F. Friedman and his faithful journeyman director Herschell Gordon Lewis uncovered a simple yet lucrative recipe for success: keep the gore running down the screen (and make sure it’s extra vivid in all-important BLOOD COLOR), keep production costs dirt-cheap, and profit handsomely from millions of bloodthirsty, drunken moviegoers. What was an outrageous endurance test fifty years ago exists today, in light of its countless imitators, as a laughably crude, amateurish (yet still stomach-churning) piece of cinematic flotsam that nonetheless possesses an inexplicably mesmerizing power. Not once in its lean, mean 67 minutes will you find yourself even remotely bored.

As with all splatter/slasher movies, the plot is as threadbare as logic will allow, serving to link together exploitative elements: a weirdo with a knife is carving up beautiful young women in picturesque Miami Beach, Florida, mutilating the bodies beyond recognition and taking away various trophies from his victims. We start off with an obligatory curtain-raising murder; Sandra Sinclair from H.G. Lewis’ proto-roughie Scum of the Earth (not to be confused with Scum of the Earth) enters a spartan one-bedroom apartment, laughs off the frantic radio bulletins regarding the Miami Beach serial killer, disrobes for a bath, and finds herself face-to-face with the grey-haired, bug-eyed, knife-wielding maniac in a matter of seconds. Suffice it to say she does not survive the encounter with both legs intact.

Since Blood Feast does not even attempt to create an aura of mystery or suspense, we are immediately introduced to the weirdo at his day job. His name is Fuad Ramses, an “Egyptian” with a Mideast American accent, dark hair seemingly colored with silver spray paint, his own “exotic catering” storefront, and a hypnotic stare. What he does in the cavernous back room of his catering/grocery store is best left to the imagination, but don’t let that imply that Lewis doesn’t show us the grisly goings-on in fetishistic detail … but not at this early stage. Instead, a cartoonishly matronly well-to-do Caucasian lady named Ms. Dorothy Fremont makes a fateful trip into Ramses’ store, inquiring about using his dubious services for a dinner party for her daughter Suzette and all her rich, worldly buddies. Seeing an easy mark, Ramses locks eyes with Ms. Fremont and makes several hypnotic suggestions having to do with “an Egyptian feast”, a lavish ritual that he does not bother to explain but Ms. Fremont hastily agrees to pay an unspecified sum of money for. After all, as we are told at least four times in this brief feature, such an event hasn’t been performed for five thousand years.

As soon as Ms. Fremont takes her leave (without giving Ramses any down payment or personal information), the kook limps into a back room adorned with red curtains, lit candles, and a vaguely Asiatic looking mannequin. Ramses raises his hands and gaze skyward and cries, “Oh, my Ishtar! Your resurrection is at hand!!” Sure, Fuad may be a tad confused as to which religion he adheres to, as Ishtar is a Babylonian and Assyrian goddess, but who would take umbrage to the Earthly reincarnation of a deity representing sex, fertility, love and war?? Ishtar’s got a little something for everyone! As an added hilarious cherry atop this absurdist sundae, Lewis continually cuts to closeups of the mannequin’s face as if expecting her/it to deliver reaction shots to Ramses’ insane rambling.

The only two people investigating this case in the entirety of the greater Miami area are a pair of incompetent, slow-witted cops speaking entirely in Dragnet dialogue and hard-boiled cliches. “All this horrible butchery and not a single shred of evidence! Not even a fingerprint!” bellows the senior officer, a police captain known only as “Frank”, punctuating the sentence by pounding on his Formica desktop. To which hapless young Pete, the junior detective, responds “Looks like it’s gonna be one of those long hard ones,” without a hint of irony. Meanwhile, Ramses continues his reign of terror with nary an obstacle to get in the way of compiling all his ingredients for Ishtar’s Cannibalistic Resurrection Feast.

It’s quite difficult to discern whether Blood Feast is intended to be hilarious or just happens to be as a result of shoddy filmmaking combined with a frenzied production schedule. Filmed in a mere nine days with a paltry budget somewhere between 24 and 60 thousand dollars (most of which surely went into stage blood and development fees for the mandatory BLOOD COLOR), the film has an unfettered, crude sort of energy aided by a minimalist yet strangely effective musical score. An ominous kettle drum accompanies the limping Ramses as he stalks Miami in search of his victims, and a trio of blaring trumpets underline various “shocking” moments with the expected lack of subtlety.

And yes, the vaunted gore scenes are still queasily effective despite their primitive nature. This is before we had F/X savants like Rick Baker, Dick Smith, Rob Bottin and Tom Savini pushing the limits of practical effects makeup, so the candy-apple garishness of the stage blood tends to be enhanced with second-hand slaughterhouse scraps.

The infamous tongue-ripping scene in the motel room, for instance, revolves around a bit of sleight-of-hand involving a sheep’s tongue; a gruesome yet side-splittingly hilarious beach scene is a showcase for some bovine brain matter; the various chunks of meat lying around Ramses’ sanguine kitchen/torture chamber/Ishtar shrine seem to be rotting beef flanks purchased from local butchers (lying beside phony plastic mannequin limbs, naturally). Despite the creepy misogynistic nature of the murder sequences, where quite a few young twenty-something co-eds are desecrated before our eyes, any power they might have is undermined by the Z-grade acting, to say nothing of the noncommittal police investigation subplot.

Mal Arnold’s performance as Fuad Ramses achieves instant ham classic status, and the two cops have all the personalities of cardboard cutouts, but the real bad acting champion is former Playmate Connie Mason as the bubble-headed Suzette, who spends most of the third act blissfully unaware of her imminent doom and suddenly goes into unchecked hysterics the moment the boys in blue storm in to sort everything out. The actress playing her easily hypnotized mother is almost as wooden, but at least she appears to be able to memorize her lines. Mason, in an early expository scene in a living room, seems to be reading dialogue off a nearby lampshade! She was paid $175 for her performance; perhaps this is the sole instance in which Lewis and Friedman overspent their cash.

What more is there to say about Blood Feast? There is no subtext, no moral, no hint of any deeper meaning to its orgy of senseless carnage, yet it’s an essential piece of cinematic history. Its relentless humor is not of the (sheep’s) tongue-in-cheek variety that would later come to characterize Lewis’ gore epics, but rather of a more naive and perhaps unintentional fashion. Follow the example of 1960s drive-in audiences and load up with some cheap brew or else this might be the longest hour and seven minutes of your life.

Perhaps it would be unreasonable to expect Jon Favreau’s Cowboys and Aliens to live up to its nutty high concept, but as the flaccid, soulless, festering end product stands now, it’s a testament to a complete waste of limitless potential and a rock-solid cast, not to mention 165 million dollars. That obscene budget doesn’t factor in the costs of a supersaturation ad campaign or all the overtime paid to the overworked, sleep deprived ILM techies slaving away at computer consoles running the latest version of Maya, rendering photorealistic, goopy CGI extraterrestrials for months on end in order to meet an impossible deadline. While the film convincingly masquerades as a generic Acid Western for the first reel and a half,  CGI overload soon kicks in, ever escalating toward a migraine-inducing, incomprehensible, clangorous third act filled with plot conveniences, deus-ex-machina rescues, cringeworthy attempts at humor, and laughably half-assed grasping at some kind of underlying moral to the whole agonizing mess. What else would you expect from the brain trust behind the Transformers trilogy and the insipid Iron Man saga? At the same time it is kind of fascinating as a singular piece of cultural detritus, an inexplicable fusion of 1970s New Hollywood cynicism with the mind-numbing spectacle of today.

We start conventionally enough with Daniel Craig, the mysterious rugged stranger and requisite Man with No Name, awakening in the desert with amnesia, a nonfatal thorax wound, and a bizarre electronic doodad affixed to his wrist. After dispatching a trio of filthy scalphunters, he makes his way to the ironically named cookie-cutter hamlet of Absolution, and within minutes is getting some topnotch frontier surgery from drunken doctor/priest Clancy Brown, which is interrupted by gunfire from the official Town Miscreant, a delightfully weaselly Paul Dano. Turns out he’s been extorting booze from meek barkeep Sam Rockwell by bullying-by-proxy with threats of retribution from his Paw, a local livestock baron, Civil War veteran and all-purpose surly rich asshole named Dollarhyde (surely a reference to the psychotic Tooth Fairy from Red Dragon). If you’re keeping count of all the Western cliches, you’ve already used up all ten of your fingers by now and are starting to count with your toes; keep in mind we aren’t even into the second reel yet.

Right on schedule, Craig asserts his dominance and disables a petulant Dano without uncrossing his arms, enabling the grizzled yet kindly town Sheriff (a nigh-unrecognizable Keith Carradine) to throw the shrimp into lockup. But wouldn’t you know it, turns out our ostensible hero is a wanted outlaw named Jake Lonergan, boasting a list of offenses longer than a cattle drive and enough stolen loot to his name to fill a Conestoga wagon. Needless to say, our protagonist barely has enough time to knock back a couple complementary shots of whiskey, and reject the rather aggressive advances of fair maiden Olivia Wilde (née Cockburn) before Carradine and his deputies stride in and get manhandled by the hesitantly badass hero. Apropos enough, since he rejects the lady’s advances for no reason other than his boilerplate Reluctant Protagonist Beat Sheet demands it, she knocks him out with the butt of a long rifle for no reason other than the necessity of the Act 2 Plot Point.

Rounding out the roster of Western stock characters is Harrison Ford as the one-dimensional Dollarhyde; though his dramatic introduction is meant to be both a knowing wink at the audience and a surprise reveal, the shock of seeing Ford’s craggy visage and hearing his snarling gravelly voice will be spoiled considerably by anyone who’s been exposed to the film’s relentless ad campaign. Ford is introduced during a very strange, brutal sequence in which he tortures a a helpless flunky by stretching him between two opposite-facing horses, while accusing him of “blowing up my cattle”; natch, he refuses to believe the flunky’s truthful assertion that aliens fired an explosive pulse at him and his fellow cowhands, and fixates on the cockamamie idea that the flunky somehow gets off on exploding his boss’s livestock (and fellow cowhands).

He’s fixing to re-enact a certain scene from The Hitcher when he gets word that Dano’s in the pokey; instead of pulling him in twain, he cuts one of the ropes and sends the lead horse away at full gallop, presumably dragging the flunky over miles of rough terrain to a prolonged, painful demise. Of course the screenplay by Michael Bay whores Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orci doesn’t bother to delve into Dollarhyde’s terrifying character (or even check back on his poor innocent flunky), because he’s merely a stick figure existing for the sole reason of driving the horseshit plot forward. He doesn’t even have time to develop as an antagonist because soon, oh so very soon, the horseshit’s about to hit the cotton gin fan.

For those of you still following along, the rest of this review will be dissecting the disastrous third act of Cowboys and Aliens, so if you must see this, and must be unaware of the retarded “surprises” in store, bully for you. Stop reading after this short ‘graph. Take my advice and bring along a fifth of whiskey, mix it with a giant 44 ounce soft drink, and take a swig for every Western Cliche, and take an extra long drink every time someone says the word “demons”. Good luck and Godspeed.

Now that we’re free to discuss the entirety of Kurtzman and Orci’s birdcage lining screenplay, let’s start by spoiling the obvious: Those Fucking Aliens.

Who are they? What are they? Where did they come from? Even when everything’s explained in a boring, massive, unimaginative and interminable  exposition dump, the answers to these basic questions are still frustratingly oblique. One thing we do know beyond the shadow of a doubt is that they time all their attacks with clockwork precision. No sooner than Ford and his torch-bearing army of thugs are confronting mellow, peace-loving Sheriff Carradine as he loads the two shackled prisoners into the stagecoach, and the plot is threatening to become interesting, those damned aliens show up and begin decimating the Greater Absolution Metropolitan Area. Then, in the first of many lazy plot conveniences, Lonergan’s mechanical wrist bracelet begins whirring and beeping and blooping and projecting holographic readouts; for some reason Craig acts stoic and kind of bored when this magical plot device begins doing its witchcraft. Within seconds he’s blasted himself out of the stage, broken Dano’s arm, and shot down an alien spacecraft in as blase a manner as humanly possible; meanwhile all manner of townsfolk are being lassoed by these ships and yanked violently into the air, turning them into CGI stunt doubles in the blink of an eye.

Presumably because it would involve logical leaps too extreme for even this script to solve with some psuedoscientific quasi-mystical gobbledygook, the remaining townsfolk are guided to the aliens’ not-so-discreet headquarters by the pilot of the shot-down spacecraft, who somehow managed to transport him/her/itself from the wreckage and flee the battlefield, leaving behind a trail of slime and comically large footprints. There isn’t even an attempt at explaining how this happens, it simply happens because the almighty Plot must be driven forward with as little downtime as possible. Anyone with half a brain can surmise, from here, where the alien track will lead the posse of survivors, who will lead this posse, the dynamics among all the posse members, and the order in which they will be picked off for the obligatory attempts at pathos.

It’s a shame that talented character actors like Clancy Brown and Sam Rockwell have to waste their formidable talents delivering expository dialogue before bland, interchangeable outdoor vistas (even though there’s an early scene, clearly improvised, where the two riff off each other hilariously; a much better movie could have been made about these two clowns trying to defeat the alien menace) and the lush anamorphic photography of Matthew Libatique starts off agreeably vivid and auburn-tinted, then gets progressively drearier and browner until we wind up in murky Heaven’s Gate territory faster than you can say “poo on the lens”.

So why do the evil E.T.’s abduct the humans? Because the Plot demands it. Because it would have been way too easy for the humans to avoid the conflict altogether by forming a wagon train and skedaddling Eastward. As we learn after a head-splittingly retarded plot contrivance, which facilitates the aforesaid Massive Exposition Dump (a scene involving a gaggle of Native American extras straight out of Central Casting, a scenery-gobbling Harrison Ford and a bowl full of peyote extract), these unnamed, personality-free extraterrestrial evildoers are little more than interstellar gold prospectors dissecting Earthlings as a kind of hobby, sort of, I guess. Like much of their motivation, save for the gold mining bullshit,  it’s left entirely to the imagination and based entirely on cliches. In other words, they’re no more well-rounded than the cast of humans. At least Kurtzman and Orci are consistent in their laziness.

Favreau, too, is becoming increasingly consistent with his soulless, generic, hyper-commercial mass-market spectacle flicks; Iron Man was the death knell for this once promising indie filmmaker, but that wasteful, pointless project was Bergman-level compared to the completely whitewashed studio slickness of Cowboys and Aliens. Whereas Iron Man was consistently hijacked by a maniacal, constantly improvising Robert Downey Jr. and stood out from the homogeneous pack of superhero garbage as a result, Cowboys is entirely subservient to a deadening, formulaic screenplay that leaves precious little breathing room for characterization and a series of monotonous CGI action sequences that are every bit as soporific and inscrutable as John Ford’s action was fiery, urgent, and immaculately choreographed. He barely moves his camera, favoring boring static shots edited to a sluggish, logy rhythm. The prosaic, unmemorable, entirely generic and un-Western-like score by Harry Gregson-Williams does no favors for the film’s energy either.

By the time we lumber to the conclusion, involving alien architecture inspired by ideas lifted from H.R. Giger’s rubbish bin, more plot conveniences courtesy of the Magical Alien Bracelet, and the laughable reveal of the film’s ultimate (and only) antagonist, what little spark the film had has long since dimmed, Favreau is just feebly trying to end the damn thing, and worst of all, it shows. There’s no passion behind the scenes, no real purpose or ultimate message or creativity in sight. After a jaw-droppingly lame action beat consisting of Craig firing his Magic Bracelet into a tunnel, gorily decimating wave after wave of humanoid goopy Space Invaders with no apparent effort or strategy involved, the evil alien doctor, who I’ll christen “Doctor Scarface”, shows up and menaces our hero for a good minute or two before a deus-ex-machina cavalry rescue reduces him to a pile of CGI goo. Then there’s yet another dramatic suicide bombing drenched in bathetic, phony holier-than-thou greater-good nonsense (though the film would have been genuinely subversive had the Preacher survived and claimed God was going to reward him in Paradise before blowing himself to smithereens), which is starting to become kind of a disturbing trend in Hollywood movies oriented toward Westernized Christian audiences.

The cynicism mentioned earlier isn’t so much contained within the barebones screenplay as it is within the formulaic, lockstep construction of the film itself. The purpose of Cowboys and Aliens isn’t to enlighten or even subvert its mashed-up genres (as what usually happens with strange genre hybrids, neither genre is given its due and the ultimate product is a formless mess); no, its only purpose is to make money by selling action figures, tie-in video games, and copies of the comic book the film was based on. There is not even the slightest attempt at sneaking in any kind of message or sneaking the tiniest glimmer of self-awareness past the draconian producers, save for the final scene.

The evil capitalist Dollarhyde and his son, who just needed to be abducted by aliens to bring him down to earth (so to speak) have inherited the town as well as the gold mine established by the extraterrestrial miners. Despite having a wrecked spacecraft in the middle of the town square, and a few dozen alien corpses in the desert, their technology hasn’t advanced one iota, and what should be a haven for the world’s scientific minds to contemplate and reverse-engineer inconceivable technology, not to mention examine the origins of organic life, is instead just another boring railroad town. Nobody mentions the aliens after the climactic suicide bombing. The status quo has returned, the bad guys have triumphed and will doubtless continue their legacy of corruption for generations to come, ruling over this town with an iron fist full of blood money. The film implies that the very existence of the aliens has been completely covered up.

As for our protagonist, who let’s not forget is an erstwhile outlaw and murderer, every woman who has dared accept his loving caresses has met a horrible death at the hands of goopy interstellar psychopaths, and his brain chemistry is irrevocably screwed up by a potent combination of alien mind-wiping, PTSD, and alcoholism. Does he stay to become Dollarhyde’s lieutenant in his new reign of terror? Regretfully not, although that would have been an ultimately cynical way to end the picture. Instead he rides off alone to his all-too-inevitable fate as a brain-damaged loner destined for a bleak future as a deranged hermit.

The ruthless tycoons win, the men of honor either die for nothing (at least disclosing the existence of the aliens would have validated the horrible deaths of all those Native Americans) or become permanently mind-fucked. Those in the audience will also be mind-fucked in the sense that more and more of their brain cells will rot away with every passing minute of the running time. As Kanbei says at the end of Seven Samurai (a film that is as masterful and trendsetting as this film is pandering and regressive), “They are the winners. Not us.”

Don’t let the gently mocking, faux-anthropological title of Penelope Spheeris’ riotous and hilarious Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years fool you into thinking this is some kind of staid, academic approach to the decidedly anti-academic world of drunken trashy 1980s hair metal. Starting with a blast of Alice Cooper music over the opening credits montage of Die Hard Metal Fans (looking nigh indistinguishable from the frizzy-haired masses assembled in the epochal Heavy Metal Parking Lot), the film maintains a full-throttle pace, leaping between interviews with all the major and not-so-major players in the scene, thrilling and not-so-thrilling concerts, and the occasional satirical or surreal aside.

Granted, Spheeris and her crew (including the husband and wife production team of Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris, who would later direct the ultra quirky overrated indie darling Little Miss Sunshine for some bizarre reason) don’t have to work very hard to land satirical blows when their well-known subjects already inhabit a lifestyle that surpasses self-parody and approaches total megalomania, and their unknown or lesser-known subjects are merely pretenders to that throne of supreme excess. First we meet Paul Stanley and Gene Simmons, better known as the legendary power-pop duo KISS; their interviews are filmed in separate locations but share the common theme of unbridled carnality bordering on satyriasis.

Stanley, in the sack with a trio of identical white women, issues braindead would-be-inspirational platitudes about years of hard work paying off and virtue being its own reward or some such shit. What the girly-man says isn’t as important as the way he wishes to portray himself; the shot is so immaculately composed, so clearly planned out weeks or months in advance that its inherent staged quality transcends its obvious falseness and speaks volumes about egoism, insecurity, and the soul-draining emptiness of “success”. Did any of these women even know Stanley before the film shoot? Were they floozies picked at random from Central Casting? Is this even Paul Stanley’s bedroom, or is it merely a smoke-filled soundstage? Who knows? Who cares? The issue of the film’s authenticity has been called into question more than a few times by its detractors, concerning a handful of scenes that will be covered later.

More amusingly, Gene Simmons gives a lucid interview in a Frederick’s of Hollywood high-end lingerie boutique wearing his trademark leather biker jacket and looking for all the world like a sleazy sexual predator. In a contrast to his comrade Stanley’s empty-headed oratory, Simmons is quick to point out the high burnout rate in his particular strata of success, and the temptation to succumb to self-destructive urges can be unavoidable in such a high-pressure, high-profile lifestyle … before his gaze wanders to the particularly well-built behind of a passing lady, and his train of thought derails completely.

From there we are introduced to a few followers of KISS, glam-rock bands such as the soon-to-be-forgotten Lizzie Borden (who perform an underwhelming power-metal cover of Steppenwolf’s “Born to be Wild” before an indifferent crowd) and the outrageously smutty Faster Pussycat, who dress like a debauched biker gang and wear an obvious Russ Meyer influence on their tattered sleeves. Thrill to the tender, sensitive lyrics of “Bathroom Wall”, a romantic love ballad about a steamy hookup facilitated via restroom graffiti, like a much less subtle version of “Jenny (867-5309)”. We briefly sojourn backstage after a successful gig at one of LA’s better-known sleazepits to discover that after performing songs about wanton drunkenness and screwing, they commence with wanton drunkenness and screwing. Hardly inspired, but at least their self-deprecating candor and lack of pretense is refreshing compared to the unchecked egoism of some of their hair-metal compatriots.

Unknown, deservedly obscure bands such as Seduce and Rigor Mortis perform loud, sloppy, derivative and just plain crappy sets, then retreat backstage for some debauchery and boasting about all the multimillion dollar record deals, world tours headlining sold-out shows in the biggest stadiums on Earth, and all the bitchin’ shit they’re gonna buy to fill up their 80-room mansions; generally behaving like entitled douchebag clowns, overgrown children who feel success is owed them simply by virtue of being able to bang out three or four power chords and investing in enough Aqua-Net to burn a hole in the ozone layer the size of Canada.

Granted, this could hardly be called a newfangled 1980s phenomenon, as these idiots are simply the next generation of washouts, just like all the hippies of the 1960s and 70s who would ingest copious amounts of marijuana, LSD and psilocybin and form shitty psychedelic bands in the hope of becoming the next Jefferson Airplane. Likewise, all the Seduces and Rigor Mortises of the hair-metal era would place a much higher priority on partying than honing their musical craft, as if Motley Crue or Van Halen became successful due to the amount of alcohol consumed rather than the amount of time spent practicing or songwriting. For every Metallica that could somehow pull off an awesome set while knocking back cubes of lager onstage, there were countless pretenders lacking in any semblance of talent. Partying was somehow seen as an impetus to greatness, rather than a reward for hard work. Surely, the fact that Spheeris and her crew with following them with cameras and sound techs must have been a sign that they were headed for the big time, and their narcissistic delusions are fueled all the more.

For a surprisingly nuanced account of a depraved, alcoholic and drug-addled existence (with occasional music), we turn to none other than the poster boy for that lifestyle: Ozzy Osbourne, the man who was once kicked out of San Antonio, Texas,  for the crime of drunkenly urinating on the Alamo.

In a sequence nearly as spellbinding as the climax of The Thirty-Nine Steps, Ozzy recounts the bad old days spent in a perpetual narcotic haze while touring with Black Sabbath, and the alcoholism that continued to plague him after the legendary heavy metal pioneers broke up and he pursued his solo career. While he recounts hilarious and cringe-inducing anecdotes in a jovial, conversational tone, Osbourne is preparing breakfast in the modest kitchen of his home in Los Angeles. The boiling tea, scrambled eggs and sizzling bacon strips on his griddle are captured with all the fetishistic detail of your typical Food Network program. It’s a strangely humanizing moment for this larger-than-life caricature of a man; compared to the KISS interviews, or the scene with some jackass from Poison talking about his “brand” with all the passion of a record company shill, Osbourne is as humble and down-to-earth as you can get while still being a world-famous rock star with more money than God.

With alcohol abuse becoming more and more of a dominant theme in the film, we meet various drunken fans, drunken wannabe successes (one kid with a towering blonde mullet, when asked about any contingency plans, claims without irony that he’d “probably die” if he did not achieve success as a musician), and perhaps the most egregious cirrhosis case in the making: Chris Holmes of W.A.S.P., a self-proclaimed “full-blown alcoholic”. In the most notorious scene in Decline Part II, he’s interviewed sitting on a floating pool chair, downing at least one and a half bottles of vodka while his own mother looks on, horrified but powerless, from poolside. When asked the reason for his suicidal and downright idiotic alcohol abuse, Holmes unscrews the cap of a fresh bottle and repeats his mantra: “I’m a full-blown alcoholic!” Then he proceeds to guzzle about a third of the bottle in one pull. Nostrovia, indeed!

One thing that most, if not all, of the drunken party groups depicted in the film have in common is that, musically, they’re all terrible in their own special, unique and precious way. While most seem to be content with being slapdash, forgettable, and slipshod in arrangement and performance of their uninspired material, Odin is a band that is terrible in a kind of transcendent, all encompassing shittiness. Their segment begins, apropos enough, with a creepy old man running a beauty pageant, an old Vaudevillian who wants to “keep it clean” while he parades around a couple dozen half-naked bimbos; the rowdy crowd soon usurps him and turns his pageant into a striptease contest, setting the stage for Odin to come out with their spandex, waist-length hair, and unspeakably shitty musicianship. The androgynous, presumably male vocalist rocks his assless chaps and lashes out his disturbingly long, lizard-like prehensile tongue while humping his microphone stand in a prone position on stage; all the while the old man is trying to pump up the crowd with an “Odin! Odin! Odin!” chant that somehow fails to catch on. The whole sequence is horrifying and inexplicable, all the more so when we join Odin backstage for familiar drunken hot tub hijinx and the insufferable vocalist is going on and on about how they’re gonna take over the world, etc. etc.

As of the time of this writing, Odin is still waiting on their record deal; their biggest exposure came from Decline Part II and their myspace profile, the best efforts of the old Vaudevillian all for naught.

All the sober personalities seen in the film, on the other hand, are not only much more articulate and distanced from the subject matter at hand, but their level-headedness seems to bring about a total lack of ego. Aside from the jaw-droppingly soulless musings of Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler and Joe Perry (who were much more interesting when they were constantly Hoovering rails of cocaine throughout the 70s), we have musings on originality and shock value from the always fascinating Alice Cooper, interviewed on stage in freshly applied bloody corpse makeup, and surprisingly passionate anti-drug sentiment from Jeff Young and Dave Mustaine of Megadeth.

While Young’s ideas about sobriety may be as trite as the verbiage from a D.A.R.E. workbook (“I don’t get fucked up when I’m practicing at home, so why would I cheat the audience that way?”) and Mustaine is still visibly bitter about his ejection from Metallica, but once Megadeth comes onstage to perform their epic “In My Darkest Hour”, all their words become meaningless white noise in the face of PURE METAL SHREDDING AWESOMENESS, which whips the crowd into a frenzy and creates a turbulent, swirling, dangerous environment filled with impromptu mosh pits, vicious elbowing, and unprovoked fistfights breaking out between concert patrons. Then Mustaine’s solo incites crowd-surfers to charge the stage and fling themselves headlong into the pulsating crowd. From the camera angle just below the edge of the stage, Megadeth towers like metal Gods before a worshipful congregation, a unified mass of rabid fans churned up into a frenzy and becoming one mindless organism, with a heart that beats to the relentless tempo of the music. Then slapstick comedy ensues after the crowd’s frenzy has sated somewhat but the crowdsurfers continue to charge the stage. Some end up crashing down painfully to the concrete, some poor folks are nearly flattened, and others misjudge their angle of approach, crashing headfirst into a towering amplifier.

While Megadeth gives far and away the best performance in a film packed with wall-to-wall music, Decline Part II should not be judged solely on the strength of its concert scenes. Some are terrible, as discussed earlier, so be sure to get as sauced up as the performers. The greatest strength of Spheeris’ epic documentary, aside from its invaluable importance as a late-80s time capsule, is its multifaceted approach to the subject matter. In a dramatic improvement from Decline Part I, which focused on the early 80s punk scene and was more or less a collection of concert scenes bookended by brief interviews, Part II adopts a more kaleidoscopic approach, making the already cartoonish personalities depicted within somehow both even more ridiculous, and yet achingly human. Those who don’t try to drown their insecurities in an alcohol blitzkrieg realize their limitations not only as artists but also as fragile human beings who generally aren’t cut out for the insane workaday lifestyle of a touring band. While the delusional drunken idiots are far more entertaining to watch, the handful successful sober individuals are the heart and soul of the film.

Sorry. I take that back. The heart and soul of Decline Part II is the universally horrendous hair. But the few who successfully combine artistry with badass guitar shredding and their awful hair are those who are most deserving of respect. Everyone else is just a fool with an enlarged liver and way too much Aqua-Net.