By Cheryl Eddy

GRAB A BOWL , toss together some Cheerios, jam, pancake syrup, sour cream, and ketchup, and coat the whole damn thing with an avalanche of sugar. You've just duplicated a particularly colorful meal enjoyed by the young hero of The Heart Is Deceitful above All Things, which kicks off the seventh annual San Francisco Independent Film Festival. You could also consider that exceptional dish a fairly accurate metaphor for the multiflavored and -textured IndieFest itself, which contains more than 75 films and videos that touch on subjects as varied as LSD, porn, and urban legend-style kidney theft.

Enigmatic author JT LeRoy's acclaimed collection of autobiographical tales informs Deceitful, Asia Argento's second balls-out effort as director-star. More coherent than Scarlet Diva but no less flamboyant, Deceitful follows the hellish childhood of wee blond Jeremiah (portrayed at various ages by Jimmy Bennett and Dylan and Cole Sprouse – twin thespians who were previously exposed to bad parenting via Adam Sandler in Big Daddy). Jeremiah owes his razor-edged jigsaw puzzle of a life to his druggie mother, Sarah (Argento), a hooker who lives in shades of bleached blond and acid wash. The film spans several years, during which time Sarah appears and disappears at unreliable intervals and Jeremiah falls prey to various horrors, wrought by Sarah's suitors (molesters, abusers), extended family members (including Peter Fonda as her Bible-beating father), and Sarah herself.

As a director, Argento takes a colorful, chaotic approach, with stop-motion animation and dreamlike interludes suggesting events seen through the eyes of one really fucked-up little kid. Deceitful lends itself to a kind of spot-the-cameo viewing mentality (can't miss 'em: Winona Ryder, Marilyn Manson, Jeremy "Jesus" Sisto), but this is Argento's happening, and her Sarah will freak you out. In Yves Montmayeur's Nice to Meet You. Please Don't Love Me! – an engaging portrait of Argento the artist, also playing IndieFest – she explains that her twin inspirations for the character were Courtney Love and Aileen Wuornos. Scared yet?

There's a lighter side to IndieFest's opening night: Will Swenson's Sons of Provo, a mockumentary about a Mormon boy band that contains nearly enough faux-earnest energy to excuse the fact that boy-band mockery reached its apex around five years ago. A better bet for your mockumentary buck is Trent Carlson's The Delicate Art of Parking, an exposé of Vancouver parking enforcers that draws unexpected humor from ordinary situations, thanks to a stellar cast and perfectly realized tone.

IndieFest's slate of actual documentaries is a diverse bunch. Michael Ferris Gibson's clever 24 Hours on Craigslist offers a by turns comedic and creepy day in the life of the Web site neither you nor I could live without. There's nothing comedic about Zev Asher's Casuistry: The Art of Killing a Cat, a profoundly disturbing study of what happens when someone (in this case, Toronto artist Jesse Power and two friends) videotapes the torture and killing of a cat – then calls it art when the police, and outraged animal activists, come knocking.

More cheerful are Made in Secret: The Story of the East Van Porn Collective, about amateur porn makers bound together by their love of erotic movies and their deep respect for consensus rule, and San Francisco filmmaker Aron Ranen's Power and Control: LSD in the 60s, an upbeat investigation as remarkable for the information it reveals (JFK did acid, man!) as for Ranen's uncanny ability to stumble on friendly, forthcoming sources as his camera rolls. And for the crank in all of us, Alan Zweig's I, Curmudgeon tracks down the likes of Harvey Pekar, Mark Eitzel, and Andy Rooney (though not, alas, Oscar the Grouch) in an attempt to get at the embittered, cranky core of what one subject dubs "negative charisma."

For anyone craving off-kilter narratives – and/or anyone who's having a hard time getting tickets to word-of-mouth cult phenomenon and total IndieFest score Raiders of the Lost Ark: The Adaptation – there's a well-rounded selection. British entry EMR, from directors James Erskine and Danny McCullough, steps into the paranoid, twist-filled life of an epileptic who may or may not be the victim of alien experiments and serious government mindfuckery. (Of local interest: the movie's several San Francisco-shot scenes, including one clearly filmed in Chinatown that features a character saying, "Yo, you're in the Mission!") Dreamy young love comes into focus in Mark Milgard's Dandelion, featuring occasionally fascinating starlet Taryn Manning (8 Mile) in a pivotal role.

Attention-deficit types have six short-film programs to choose from, with entries from Bill Plympton and Caveh Zahedi among them. And if IndieFest's spin-off horror festival (set for mid-March) can't come soon enough for you, hit the closing-night selection, Alex Turner's Dead Birds, about a gang of Civil War-era bank robbers trapped in a ghostly mansion. The movie suffers from too-familiar plotting, because, well, how many ways are there to make a haunted-house picture, really? Still, Dead Birds scores points with unexpected visual references (The Grudge makes its presence known), and there's ultimately enough grisly carnage to favorably tip the scales.

San Francisco Independent Film Festival runs Feb. 3-15. Venues are the Castro Theatre, 429 Castro, S.F.; the Roxie Cinema, 3117 16th St., S.F.; the Women's Building, 3543 18th St., S.F.; and Mama Buzz Cafe/Ego Park, 2318 Telegraph, Oakl. For advance tickets go to www.sfindie.com.