The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (Tue., Aug. 8, dusk, Liberty Lands Park, Third and Poplar sts.) Penelope Spheeris' follow-up to her inimitable chronicle of L.A. punk charts the scene's descent into hair-farming guitar wank. Considering that Spheeris' subjects include Faster Pussycat and W.A.S.P., it's a mercy that the film opts for interviews over performance, although the talking-head stuff is no less painful. A never-was band spouts delusions of grandeur while flyering the Sunset Strip, and W.A.S.P.'s lead guitarist drinks himself stuporous in his mother's swimming pool, proclaiming the rewards of the good life while sounding like someone you'd step over in the street. Like the first Decline, The Metal Years is an unsparing and at times unsympathetic portrait of the rock 'n' roll decadence of a community that consumes more souls than it elevates.

Cavite ($26.98 DVD) Ingeniously converting their near-total budgetary limitations into a plot device, Ian Gamazon and Neill Dela Llana's shoestring thriller keeps its camera glued to Gamazon's displaced Muslim as he picks his way through the crowded marketplaces of Manila. A Filipino-American who barely remembers his homeland, Adam (Gamazon) is drawn home by the death of his father, but the family tragedy doesn't end there; as soon as he steps off the plane, a cell phone call informs him that his mother and sister have been kidnapped, and will be killed if he doesn't follow the caller's instructions.

Part high-concept clock-ticker and part nightmare of repatriation, Cavite (named for an slum on Manila's outskirts) puts Adam at the mercy of an Islamic militant who insists that Adam recover money allegedly stolen by his late father (whose death, Adam soon suspects, was not accidental). The unseen (and uncredited) caller never disguises his contempt for Adam's Westernized ways, mocking his command of Tagalog and pronouncing his American name with evident distaste. Stripping Adam of his baggage and guiding him deeper into the city's crowded heart, the caller sadistically forces a queasy Adam to gulp down a fertilized duck egg called a balut, sneering, "You need to experience your culture."

Cavite isn't particularly well-made, and Gamazon, a last-minute fill-in for an actress who refused to get on the plane, isn't nearly a strong enough actor to carry a movie on his back. The movie's time-bomb framework turns out to be too rigid to accommodate the complexities of diasporic alienation, reducing the caller's speeches about Filipino independence and cultural imperialism to sinister rumblings. If there's something heartening about the fact that the notion of American independent film is now large enough to include a hand-held video shot by a two-man crew in a foreign country whose dialogue is largely in a foreign language, there's something depressing about the fact that the price of entry is a thoroughly derivative plot whose mandates eventually squeeze out all but the most conservative conclusions.

(sam@citypaper.net)