Anything harder than Triple X?

8MM (1999)

Reviewed by Jerry Saravia

Director Joel Schumacher must rate as one of my personal guilty pleasures in the movies. He is the creator of such diverse works such as "Batman Forever," "St. Elmo's Fire," "Flatliners" and the execrable "Batman and Forever." Add the much maligned and thoroughly trashed "8mm" to the list - an often thrilling excursion into the unknown, in this case, the world of snuff films.

Nicolas Cage stars as Tom Welles, a private detective working in cahoots with the Missing Persons Bureau. One day, he is asked by a rich widow (Myra Carter) to investigate a possible snuff film found in her late husband's safe. If it is real, she wants to know, and to determine the identity of young half-naked girl  who was supposedly killed by a man in a mask, known as the Machine.

This investigation takes Tom to the porno underworld of L.A., shown to be grungy and filled with neon-green lights. He meets a porno shop clerk with rock music aspirations, Max (Joaquin Phoenix) who may have connections to this depraved world. And depraved it is, as Schumacher goes out of his way to show how snuff or porno films are morally wrong. It is a typically Hollywood-ish moralistic statement, as benign as anything that would have been made in late 60's or early 70's.

"8mm" has moments of tension and there is a general feeling of something unnerving waiting to happen. My problem with the film is that when Tom gets so sucked into this world that he thinks of killing those who are responsible for the girl's death (since the 8mm film is a snuff, after all), it quickly becomes as exploitative and cheap as the very subject that it is criticizing. Plus, Tom's descent into Schumacher's Hell is not as enveloping as one might imagine, and many of Tom's actions seem too over-the-top to truly believe. He becomes a killer after being seduced by the devil ("the devil changes you," quips Max at one point) but such a man would have fallen apart in far more dangerous ways, I think, than the screenplay by Andrew Kevin Walker ("Seven") allows.

The strength in "8mm" is Nicolas Cage's occasionally restrained performance and the first half of the film has an eerie, odorous feel to it, thanks to the decadently colored art direction and cinematography, complete with lots of dark green colors and silhouettes. Another plus is the comic relief supplied by Joaquin Phoenix; the incredibly Satanic porn director (Peter Stormare); and the toughness of James Gandolfini (star of HBO's "The Sopranos") as a low-rent producer. I also like the last shot of Machine, revealed to be anything less than monstrous.

"8mm" is serious stuff, and some of it is campy but it also contains an existential motif that is unfortunately eschewed for action cliches and happy endings. All I can say is that it took real guts for someone in Hollywood to associate themselves with the so-called urban legend of snuff films.