THE BOX NEXT TO FILM CLIPS : Hate From Down Under : Director Geoffrey Wright survived death threats to make ‘Romper Stomper,’ a graphic look at Australian skinheads

Goons with swastika tattoos and shaved heads, swinging chains, beating the hell out of Vietnamese kids at a train station.

London? Berlin? New York? Would you believe Melbourne, Australia? Welcome to the violent world of “Romper Stomper,” a brutal look at the skinhead culture Down Under from first-time Australian director Geoffrey Wright. This is not the “put another shrimp on the barbie” invitation Crocodile Dundee had promised.

Since its emergence on the international film scene about 15 years ago, Australian cinema has largely focused on pastoral and mystical meditations on its history with such films as “Picnic at Hanging Rock” and “My Brilliant Career.” “Romper Stomper” is closer in cinematic tradition to “A Clockwork Orange” and “Taxi Driver.”

“Romper Stomper,” which opens Wednesday at the Nuart, was not the kind of home-grown material moviegoers in Australia were used to seeing, and many didn’t want to see it. For months after it opened there, it was impossible to pick up a newspaper or watch the evening news in Australia without seeing a “Romper Stomper” story. Politicians and critics ascended their soapboxes and accused Geoffrey Wright of encouraging violence. David Stratton, the Roger Ebert of Australia, deemed the film “dangerous” and a “celebration of violence.” The city council of the Melbourne suburb where the film was shot threatened to take legal action against the film’s production company.

“The people who object to ‘Romper Stomper’ think it’s wrong to put a spotlight on what’s ugly in Australia. They think we should be doing happy stuff or uplifting stuff,” says Wright.

“In the past, if we did something violent, it had a fantasy element like the ‘Mad Max’ series, which had a post-apocalyptic setting,” Wright says. “But this was in the here and now and takes place in our own country.”

Having worked as a film critic in Melbourne and directed a short movie about the relationship between two British migrants, Wright, 34, was committed to telling urban stories. “I’m a city boy and that’s what I know.”

Not surprisingly, when he pitched the idea of a fictional film about skinheads to the national and regional financing organizations, he got a cool reception. “And who could blame them, after all, they’re answerable to the Australian government,” admits the director. When it came time to make the film, Wright’s supporters in the Australian Film Commission and Film Victoria convinced the agency to put up the film’s $1-million budget.

Wright had started observing skinheads in the early ‘80s and became increasingly drawn to them as dramatic subjects as their politics became more extreme. He recognized that their goal wasn’t to create a government, but to have something exciting to do. Radical politics was like a drug for them. Although the skinhead culture in Melbourne has been in decline for the past year, Wright sees rising bigotry in Australian as part of an international problem. High unemployment has left the youth at loose ends and encouraged a more subtle form of racism.

Australian skinheads are linked with their European counterparts by a network of magazines and correspondents and maintain loose affiliation with groups such as the Ku Klux Klan. While skinheads have become an all too familiar sight, the spectacle of these misfits parading around at the bottom of the world is somehow more unsettling because it contradicts the image of Australia as a peaceful society immune to the problems of the west.

“It’s weird how these kids see themselves as extensions of central European fascism,” says Wright.

To get inside the skinhead mind, Wright hung out with them for six months. At first they were excited by the attention. Eventually some of the more intelligent gang members started asking questions. “When they realized I wasn’t doing ‘Triumph of the Will,’ I wasn’t welcome anymore,” Wright says. Before filming was over, he had received several death threats.

“Romper Stomper” doesn’t have much of a plot. It’s more like one wave of attacks after the other. Wright took the story for the film and its characters from actual situations and distilled them to fit a movie. In real life, the events had involved a larger number of characters over a longer period of time. “That’s what any storyteller does. Otherwise you have a miniseries.”

In the film, everyday hostility toward Asian immigrants escalates to a boiling point when the newcomers buy a neighborhood skinhead bar.

But regardless of how violent the film is, it pales in comparison to reality. Wright recalls a case last year where the skinheads showed up in court in full Nazi regalia, “ seig heil ing” their way through a murder trial. “They had taken a guy’s arms and legs off and tried to bury him. Bloodier than anything in the film.”

Like their counterparts in Europe and America, the Australian skinheads are the most desperate castoffs from the rest of society. Still, Wright found they could be like ordinary people when they weren’t talking about cracking someone’s skull. Although his characters live in a boarded-up Melbourne warehouse, he purposefully shows the guys and their girlfriends living in a crude version of everyday life. He has even stuck in a conventional love triangle between gang leaders and a girl they pick up along the way. When Hando (Russell Crowe), the macho gang leader, reads his girlfriend (Jacqueline McKenzie) a passage from “Mein Kampf,” his eyes go soft and soulful as if he were reading her love poetry. She responds by licking his ear.

But Wright is not looking at the skinheads through rose-colored glasses. “They’re sinners, aren’t they? They do bad things and they are bad. But they’re pathetic as well. I don’t regret making them sympathetic because I honestly feel sorry for them,” he explains.

Wright’s strategy is simple. He draws you in, hooks you on the adrenaline rush of the action and then lets you crash hard. The uniforms, the black boots, the sound of breaking glass and pounding music. “It’s like virtual reality,” Wright says. “All of a sudden you’re running with these goons and you want them to get away. I find the clash between the intellectual and the physical is really quite something for the audience. You wonder what happened to your moral perspective.”

In answer to his critics, Wright recalls screenings of the film where Asians and skinheads were left so numb that they would walk out of the theater rubbing shoulders and not even notice each other. “If they were jumping up and down in the foyer and running around the block, then I would have known I created a Frankenstein,” he said. “I only had to look at their faces to know the film wasn’t inspiring violence.”

Wright expects his film to draw as much heat in America as it did in Australia. It has already been banned in Germany by the film rating board for fear that it would promote fascist attitudes. Wright thinks such knee-jerk reactions fail to acknowledge the fundamental reason why skinheads or anyone else commits violence.

“All of a sudden, they have a sense that blood is pumping in their veins, that they’re not vegetables,” Wright says. “They’re attracted to violence not to see the world run by skinheads but to get their rocks off.”