NONFICTION FILM - MOVIES - Experiments in terror - Director Barbet Schroeder has a particular flair for films that expose the evil that walks among us.

Not the monsters of horror films such as "Frankenstein" and "Dracula." Schroeder's monsters are very real: Socialite Claus von Bulow in "Reversal of Fortune," or the drug-dealing teenage hit men of "Our Lady of the Assassins," or most memorably the late and unlamented Ugandan dictator and mass-murderer Idi Amin. Schroeder spent many anxiety-ridden months in 1974 filming the man whose life was re-created last year in dramatic form in "The Last King of Scotland." But Schroeder's bio/documentary, "General Idi Amin Dada" (now available on DVD,) doesn't have the filter of Forest Whitaker's performance to keep horror at bay. When his camera points at Amin, it's the real deal.

And so is his latest film, "Terror's Advocate."

While it's obvious throughout "General Idi Amin Dada" that Schroeder was inches away from incurring the monster's displeasure -- thus risking his life -- no such danger looms in "Terror's Advocate." For its subject, the wildly controversial lawyer Jacques Verges, is the soul of the "civilized" -- witty, urbane, convivial -- a lover of "the good life" in the best French bourgeois tradition. The monstrousness seeps through this discreet charm in the form of the clients Verges has defended over the years: Seventies-era leftist bomber Magdalena Kopp, Nazi Klaus Barbie, genocidal ex-Yugoslav dictator Slobodan Milosevic among others.

And that's not to mention the monsters Verges knew in his personal life -- like Cambodian despot Pol Pot (whom we learn in "Terror's Advocate" he went to school with as a boy) and freelance quasi-political psychopath Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, known and feared throughout the world as "Carlos the Jackal."

"Verges was a hero to me when I was very young, for defending the Algerian cause," said Schroeder, speaking by phone from Japan where he's in the midst of his latest production, "Inju."

"Like many people of my generation I supported the Algerians in their struggle against the French. But after a time he turned into someone out of a Balzac novel. He vanished for eight years and when he returned as Klaus Barbie's lawyer -- well, he was really pretty disgusting. The end credits show that his clients are now all African dictators with lots of blood on their hands."