When I watched 8 MM, I didn't know what to expect, but I noticed that Joel Schumacher directed it and I am a fan of his. Also it stars two other terrific actors like Nicholas Cage and Joaquin Phoenix, so usually that equals a great film. 8 MM turned out to be a terrific dark drama that I'm not so sure that I understand it's low rating. I was actually expecting it to be in the 7.0 range when I went to check it out on IMDb, but it's in the low 6.0's. I understand that it's an extremely dark movie that not too many people would wanna take a look at, but for what it was, I thought it was great. It took us into the deep dark world of porn and what some sick people get off on. It's not just about that, but also it takes us into a detective type of drama that makes it into a scary type of thriller.

Tom Welles is a detective that is given a strange short movie called a "snuff film", where a beautiful young girl is being brutally raped and then murdered on film. While it's supposed to be fake, it looks incredibly real and terrifying. Her relative asks him to find out wither it is fake or real and if she's still alive. This means he has to go deep into a world of brutal porn that is out of his league. With the help of a porn salesman, Max, they go to find out if this girl is really alive or not, but end up getting into some serious trouble when the directors and "actors" find out about them.

8 MM is in no way for the faint of heart, there are some extremely disturbing images that I really wouldn't like to see again, I'm sure most wouldn't either, but this is a great dark drama that I would recommend for a watch. Nicholas did a great job, but Joaquin really takes the show here. He made his character incredibly believable and almost sympathetic. Joel really made me believe the story, he shot it wonderfully and didn't over do anything. I would recommend this film for a watch, it's a great thriller that is impressive as well as scary.

8/10

There is a lot to be said about skill. Joel Schumacher is responsible for Batman & Robin, one of the most horrendously made movies in the past 15 years. One could have said upon leaving the theater in 1997 that Joel Schumacher is one of the worst directors working today. Two years later, Schumacher creates something, albeit with commercial sensibilities, that succeeds on many levels. 8mm is a murky, scuzzy passage through the miserable, dystopian criminal world of snuff films, taken on by a private investigator who is dismayed and scarred by what he unearths. It probes the resources of violent exploitation films, but not as a violent exploitation film. It would more accurately turn your stomach than amuse. Andrew Kevin Walker, who wrote Seven, and again establishes a protagonist who confronts evil and nearly loses his sanity in an effort to understand its reasons. The answer comes almost at the end of the film, from its most vicious character, but his rationale wittingly refrains from going as deep as the psychological world of his deeds. Joel Schumacher has an attraction to sinister, perhaps Gothic environments, even if his previous films that follow that pattern aren't so great, like The Lost Boys. Here, with Mychael Danna's sorrowful score and the great Robert Elswit's guilty, peeping camera, he fashions an impression of apprehension even in the few scenes where the story takes solace in Cage's home life. One director would not be wrong to shock us with a comparison to the unsuspecting atmosphere of Cage's residential street or the opening airport shot, but Schumacher perceives the looming subterranean goings-on beneath the unsuspecting.

The intent of the story is to consider a rather everyday individual and provoke him into such a troubling conflict with pure evil that he himself is pushed to torture and murder. He lives an unexciting but mostly happy life with his wife Catherine Keener and their infant daughter. He went to a good school on an academic scholarship, however while his contemporaries went through the most conventional motions to become lawyers, doctors, bankers, he chose a line of work comprised of following, shadowing, investigating, staking out, watching. For the sake of a comfortable living, he accommodates an upper crust circle of socialites and politicians. Nevertheless, this case which he almost does not take is unique. He is sent for by the attorney of a rich widow whose husband has just died. Whilst rummaging through the inside of her husband's safe, she and the lawyer find an 8 mm film of what seems to be the vicious slaying of a teenage girl by a large masked man. Cage convinces himself that the film, while horrifying, is simulation, but the widow wants him to confirm this for sure.

8mm doesn't consider the story's dilemmas merely as opportunity for money-making set pieces like action scenes. When Cage has the chance to take revenge, he doesn't have the command of his motivation because he does not have the same capacity for murder that his prospective victims have, and he essentially calls a character wounded by this person and provokes her to talk him into it. That is a novel approach the protagonist's vengeful turning point, and it elicits subliminal moral uncertainty that the audience has to take in hand.

8mm is a conventional studio thriller, but it is a real movie. It is all content and the suitable approach to that content. It is about human's aptitude for malevolence, conjecturing just deep it can go and how little we care to know of it in ourselves.

Joel Schumacher may have bombed out with the atrociously-received BATMAN AND ROBIN, but his latest thriller is a complex, thrilling movie which gives us a detailed character breakdown of the hero, who himself is partially seduced by the dark side and not altogether good. It's not often we get psychological insights like this in mainstream movies, but Nicolas Cage is able to pull the role off, and still come out on top as a likable figure.

The movie starts out well, depicting the classy side of the obscene, before gradually moving into murkier and murkier depths, eventually leading to a conclusion where Cage commits acts just as bad as the people he's after. Cage is fast becoming one of my favourite actors of recent years, and he once again excels himself. A solid cast is built around him, including an intelligent, likable sidekick with Joaquin Phoenix, an up-and-coming star, and also the actress playing his wife, who portrays her mental suffering excellently. In fact, there isn't a bad performance in the whole film, from the grief-stricken good guys to the drugged up bad guys, who simply have no compassion and no regrets about what they do: it doesn't even bother them.

The subject matter was enough to put a lot of people off this film, but it really isn't that bad, apart from quite a few sexual situations, this is nothing worse than what you'd see late night on Channel 5. The most disturbing thing of all is the actual snuff film itself, especially the drugged, dozy eyes of the young victim as she gets butchered to death. This is pretty hard to take, especially when we learn how she was just a normal girl, who got seduced by promises of a career in the movie industry. This is pretty close to reality and it could happen, which is why it's all the more disturbing. When we meet the bad guys in the final half of the film, it's not that bad as they're just like you and me, making money.

This is perhaps over-emphasised at the end of the film, with the unmasking of the central character Machine, who acts as an executioner in the snuff film. He turns out to be just a normal, overweight man with glasses; there's nothing strange about this man who could be a friend, or neighbour. On the outside he's perfectly normal. On the inside, he's a twisted pervert. Much of the violence is kept off screen, except at the end where Cage goes around bringing much-deserved vengeance to all the scum and sickos involved.

8MM turns out to be an intelligent, thoughtful look at one man's obsession and the depths to which the human race will sink. It's got it's fair share of flaws, but these have unfairly meant that it's got something of a bad reputation, probably from cinema goers hoping for the CGI effects or explosions of the latest blockbuster, or for something really profound. It's underrated, and surprisingly good.