TV REVIEWS : Skinheads in Their Own Words on HBO

From its startling opening shots of a neo-Nazi rock ‘n’ roll band pounding out white power songs, “Skinheads USA: Soldiers of the Race War” (at 10 tonight on HBO, with repeats Monday and May 13, 16 and 28) is a disturbing and ultimately depressing look at an American subculture.

Part of HBO’s “America Undercover” series and shot in a tele- verite style, “Skinheads USA” lets its subjects reveal themselves in their own outrageous words and deeds.

The program focuses on a group calling itself the Aryan National Front with its headquarters a dirt farm near Birmingham, Ala. Not so much a political force as a band of the young and disaffected, the front’s leader is Bill Riccio, identified by the show’s producers as a three-time convicted felon who, Fagin-like, attracts troubled teen-agers to his organization.

The HBO cameras follow Riccio and his Skinhead band as they try to recruit new members from among other Southern teen-agers, attend a Ku Klux Klan rally and cross burning and, of course, practice their marksmanship for the race war they are sure is coming.

But mostly they just seem to hang out at Riccio’s farm, posturing among the Nazi paraphernalia that decorates the farmhouse. Watching a video of a Hitler-era Nazi propaganda film, one youth says: “I wish I had lived back then. Those people look so happy.” Another says: “I wish he (Hitler) had won the war.”

As disturbing as this look at Skinheads is, one wonders: If this scruffy group allowed a documentary crew this kind of access, what about the hate groups that operate more secretly? Who is watching them?