THROUGH A LENS DARKLY

Cohen, whose Disappearance (1989) showed a knack for nightmarish intensity, delivers the goods again in this twisted tale of an unwilling pornographer of violence confronting a family of small-town killers. Chris Thomas, who scored an unexpected and grisly success with his dying-moments compilation videos Raw Death and Raw Death 2, hopes to escape his sleazoid producer Al Dorsey, of R.I.P. Productions, by going to the Midwest to make a film on soil erosion. There's no escape, though, when he realizes that his shots of a young woman being pulled dead from a frozen lake match up with some footage he shot the night before showing her together with her date Todd Meacham, who has the same look as the killers (``Moment Makers'') in Raw Death. And when Chris and his crew start to spy on the Meacham household, they discover that Todd's father William's been beating, maybe abusing, him for years. Meantime, Al Dorsey, excited about the new partner he's found for Chris on Raw Death 3—a real sicko named Don Campo—insists that he fly back to L.A., so Chris and his crew, hoping to catch Todd in the act, try getting under his skin (planting a prostitute on him) and under his father's (showing William a copy of Raw Death), with predictably gruesome results. Tender sensibilities beware, not because of explicit violence (you could easily find worse) but because of Cohen's absorption with fascinatingly repellent states of mind—especially his memorably schleppy Chris, genuinely revolted by violence-maven Campo but all- too-plausibly drawn toward the horrifying fantasies of the Meachams.