It's likely that you already know Indecline as the masterminds behind the much-maligned Bumfights DVD series, and you've probably formed some preconceived notions. Most people wouldn't blame you, but allow me to kick things off here with a little test for you. Ready suckers? Here goes.

Picture footage of a homeless woman, physically ravaged by drug abuse yet still able to convince horny New Yawkers that she's a working prostitute. The camera rolls from a nearby street corner as she hustles her way into some schlep's car to whack his willy. Then she drops the real bomb; flashing a dime-store plastic badge, she fools the poor bastard into thinking she's an undercover cop. Understandably spooked, the man whimpers that he's a family man and asks how he might absolve himself. The woman relieves him of all his loot as a "bribe", tells him she better never catch him in the act again, and then heads off to her crack-fiend scarecrow of a boyfriend. Later, after many extreme close-ups of piss-yellow junk being spiked into arm-veins black as negro water moccasins, the woman's lover boots her in the ass so hard she hits the street face-first. Then he grabs her purse and hurls it across the parking lot. We get every nuance of her hysteria as she wails and staggers about the sidewalk, searching in vain for her only possessions.

Now... where do you think I saw this lurid little spool of camcorder tape? The latest Bumfights video, right? Wrong, succotash. It was Dope Sick Love, part of HBO's "America Undercover" documentary series. I watched it at one in the morning the last time my girlfriend was out of town. No doubt you've seen ads for these shows on before Six Feet Under or whatever. They claim to be "raw" and "uncensored", their subject matter ranging from pimps and hos to junkies and crackheads. So I ask you this... what, honestly, is the difference between what I've described, and the work of Indecline?

Simple. HBO's docus are lensed by the latest crop of NYU film brats, while Indecline consists mainly of skaters and graffiti taggers with handheld cameras. HBO merely plays at depicting the razor-thin line between "us" and "them", order and chaos; Indecline's work comes from that line itself. They may not have the credibility of the HBO set, but you simply won't get any deeper underground on a legally sold DVD. And if you're one of those people who enjoys the occasional smack-head documentary as a way of dipping your toes in the muck of society, then this video is going to hold your head down in that muck until it crawls like black bongwater into your sinuses and asshole.

The production and design on the DVD are very slick. The menu looks great, and the music is in the same kinetic vein as the earlier videos, punctuating sudden, violent action with machine-gun drum-and-bass, or full-shred death metal. However, unlike the Bumfights tapes, the camera takes a relatively passive role here. You won't find any footage of the "Bum Hunter", or of Roofus the Stunt Bum and Donnie the Vet pounding each other silly for a sandwich. Here, the footage seems much more spontaneously captured. At the opening (following a vitriolic news story on the Indecline crew, much like Bumfights 2), we meet a distraught and from-the-looks-of-it homeless woman as she screams to no one on a street late at night. "I keep getting raped, and raped, and there's never any people around me," she wails, as the camera crew tries in vain to understand her situation. The horror you feel at the woman's situation quickly turns to shock as you realize that she thinks she's being raped AT THAT MOMENT, by people she cannot see. It makes Indecline's point so much more clearly than the news footage could; this is what is going on all around you. They're merely documenting it. This is society in decline. You're going to have to accept it sooner or later.

Of course, like the earlier videos, there is a lot of footage of street fights (though not enough chick fights for my taste). Sometimes a hammer or a sword enters into the picture with lethal result. There's also a satisfactory amount of gnarlsome skate footage, enhanced with simple line animation; nothing new (or unenjoyable) there. Where the video really takes flight is the incredible Project Mayhem-style corporate sabotage; McDonalds billboards are so cleverly vandalized that even a TV anchorman is impressed by the effort. As you witness hard-core graffiti artists rappelling into position to throw up their latest masterpiece with lightning time-lapse speed, you get a sense that you're watching something legitimately rebellious. Watchmen-style silhouettes of people falling to the ground or lighting fires are stenciled onto storefronts. (The DVD even comes with an Indecline stencil for audience participation.) It's the closest anything I've seen in years has come to "antiestablishment", and as I watched some faceless yuppie get a dollar sign spray-painted on his back as he chatted away on his accursed cell phone, I couldn't help but laugh my ass off.

Like all of Indecline's output, you get a lovely cross-section of people generally cold-shouldered in film. Jerome, a modern-day skater reboot of Prince Randion from Tod Browning's Freaks, rolls his paraplegic self headlong into passersby, knocking them clattering to the pavement (and these two-legged people have the balls to complain afterward). Later, in a drunken tableau just right for a Harmony Korine film, he has his way with a "Tickle-Me-Elmo" doll, who likely didn't foresee being tickled in such a manner. There are countless mentally ill and retarded people on screen (although not re-enacting the battle scene from Braveheart, as in Bumfights 2), not a far cry from the ones I saw in the hospitals I used to visit my mother in. Then there's the horrible cosmic satisfaction that comes from seeing a mouthy drunk get the living crap pounded out of him, whether it's a tagger who just can't seem to grasp the tangible boundaries of respect and territory, or the idiot "artfag" who calls himself "The Conceptual Genius" (and nearly gets his portfolio crammed up his ass).

There's also a healthy dose of stuff you may wish you hadn't seen. Police on horseback are barely able to hold back a full-blown riot, complete with hurled barricades. Newspaper boxes are vaporized with homemade aerosol bombs. "Girls Gone Wild" rejects are degraded and slapped around for being so damn stoopit. A disturbed man with a clump of shit on his forehead laments as his pet dead pigeon is cleaved in twain by a train (sorry, I couldn't resist). However, all of it gels nicely as a strangely cohesive whole. If Indecline was looking for any sort of art-house legitimacy (which I'm resonably sure they aren't), they're one step closer with this video. I laughed in spite of myself when I realized that during the final scene- a montage of the usual street suspects (what assholes term the "dregs of humanity") reciting "I'm an American", as in the infamous post-9/11 PSA (though with Bling Bling!)- I was almost moved to tears.

Do I recommend this video? As with "Bumfights", that depends on who you are. If you're over 18 and you feel like you can think for yourself, than watch the DVD. Maybe you really can think for yourself. I feel better about the fact that I enjoyed this video than I would if I enjoyed "One Tree Hill" every week on the WB. Pick your poison. Do you want to sit on your ass and numb yourself impotent with mediocre pap, or do you want to be forced to make up your mind about how you see the world?

I'll go with Indecline.