Bonfire of the Banalities Following on from the first film in the Decline of Western Civilisation trilogy, which looked at the L. A. punk scene, this second instalment takes a look at metal, specifically the L. A. glam metal scene. Needless to say, there are some pretty obvious differences between the films. The most obvious being that the metal crowd are actively wanting fame and success, which in fairness you can hardly argue with. But there is a general vacuousness about most of the guys interviewed in this doc (I specifically say men because, quite similar to Part 1, the women here for the most part all seem FAR more level-headed and intelligent!). Future Wayne's World director Penelope Spheeris is on hand to actively encourage the stupidity of the participants with her questions, although in order to achieve this she hardly needs the interview skills of Alan Wicker, given that most of these metal-heads offer up banalities free of charge. A lot of the interviewees are guys from 'up-and-coming' bands and their confidence in future success certainly could be described as delusional, albeit they do not have the benefit of hindsight where we all know that two or three years later grunge was on the way leading to instant annihilation in what could be known as the Hair Metal Holocaust. So, in many respects this doc can now be viewed as hanging out with a bunch of people who are about to be catastrophically derailed but who are at present happily unaware of the onrushing disaster.
In amongst the interviews there are a series of live performances, all of which seemed to be terrible bands playing the same song - except for Megadeth whose thrash metal sound did somewhat stick out here like a sore thumb. Several successful artists are interviewed to varying effect, such as the aforementioned Megadeth, Ozzy Osbourne, Poison, Alice Cooper, Aerosmith, Kiss, Lemmy and the not-yet-known Vixen. There are occasional moments of comedy such as the band London epically failing to burn a Soviet flag or the surreal bizarreness of W. A. S. P. guitarist Chris Holmes out of his head on booze in a pool on a floating chair while his mum looks on ambivalently. There's also a super-sleazy old guy in a hat who organises a bikini contest in which several of the hair metal wannabees are the judges. Its overall certainly a mish-mash of stupidities which make up this documentary but then, the hair metal scene of L. A., with its focus on partying, must certainly be in the running to claim the title of the dumbest music genre of all time. While there are moments of manipulation in the editing in this one for sure, it nevertheless is a reasonably revealing look at this rock music scene, however, most people who watch it will understand why it really needed to be wiped out by alternative rock!