When it comes to movie sequels, part 3 is usually never as good. This is how I felt about this third and final entry in The Decline of Western Civilization series. This one feels more like a documentary about the homeless rather than a music oriented production. The first two were pretty enjoyable and offered interesting and often profane insight into two popular genres of music. The first film focused on punk while the second focused on metal. For part 3, Penelope Spheeris decided to cover gutter punk, a subgroup of punk culture which exemplifies a type of vagabond lifestyle. Most (if not all) of the musicians being recorded and interviewed are homeless, and just like the punks from the first movie, they don't view authority favorably. In fact I think it's worse here, because some of them appear mildly psychotic. One girl they interview (Spoon I think) has a ring of circular shaped burns wrapping around her arm. She says they're marks left by cigarettes after some of her friends used her skin to put them out. In spite of the fact pressing a lit cigarette to your arm would be incredibly painful, she tells Spheeris how she wants a complete ring of burn marks on her arm. Most of the kids Spheeris talks to in this film are similarly weird and hopeless (for lack of a better word). Lots of them give the same answer to Spheeris when she asks them where do you see yourself in five years: dead. They don't even really seem to care about how their own lives turn out, because many of them came from abusive households that they were happy to vacate, which explains why they're homeless in the first place. Some of them are so pathetic they have to beg people for money or agree to have complete strangers take pictures of them in exchange for money. After all this, the money is mostly spent on beer and drugs anyway. The film still has the saving grace of the footage of the band performances, but the cynical and jaded attitudes that the majority of people featured have gets old pretty fast. When I said some of the kids here are pathetic, I wasn't kidding. One of them says how he has to break into people's houses just to get food, and he has no remorse because he feels it is necessary for his survival. At the end of the film, it says how shortly after it was made, Squid (one of the punks interviewed) was stabbed to death by Spoon, his so called girlfriend, and she's awaiting trial in LA. Just what I expected. To make a long story short, I mostly found this movie disappointing. The first film is great because it shows punk as a brand new and fascinating genre that is just getting started. By the late 90s, punk is a shadow of its former self, and so are the people partaking in it. Even the rebellious musicians from the first movie would probably be embarrassed to be lumped in with the kids talked about here. Doing drugs, stealing from people, and getting into street fights with wannabe nazis are all they seem to brag about. It's over 2 decades later, and punk is mostly a forgotten genre. If the people interviewed in this movie are what's considered true punk fans, maybe that's for the best.
