Visions Other Than Sugarplums

With two home video packages each from Guns N’ Roses and Metallica and one or two releases that might not be suitable for family viewing, it’s a tough season for a rock ‘n’ roll Santa. The Calendar Video Shopping Guide of releases by some of pop’s biggest names offers some help. The videos, listed alphabetically, are rated on a scale from one star (poor) to four stars (excellent).

* * 1/2 Guns N’ Roses, “Use Your Illusion I World Tour--1992 in Tokyo,” Geffen Home Video. The band performs passionately enough in this 90-minute concert video, but the tone is so conventional that it is far from the essential tour memento that you’d expect from a group with so much sense of occasion.

* * Guns N’ Roses, “Use Your Illusion II World Tour--1992 in Tokyo,” Geffen Home Video. Despite the titles, these twin videos don’t duplicate the song sequence of the group’s 1991 albums. The generally stronger material--including “Civil War,” “November Rain” and “Welcome to the Jungle”--is in Volume I.

* * * 1/2 U2, “Achtung Baby. . .The Videos, the Cameos and a Whole Lot of Interference From Zoo TV,” PolyGram Video. Wrapped in the visual swirl of the “Zoo TV” tour, rock’s premier band combats the problem of videos’ forcing a single interpretation of a song on you by offering three competing video treatments of two of the band’s best recent songs: “One” and “Even Better Than the Real Thing.”