Product Details

• Actors: Nicolas Cage, Joaquin Phoenix, James Gandolfini, Peter Stormare, Anthony Heald
• Directors: Joel Schumacher
• Writers: Andrew Kevin Walker
• Producers: Joel Schumacher, Gavin Polone, Jeff Levine, Joseph M. Caracciolo, Judy Hofflund
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
• Language: English
• Rated: R (Restricted)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: Sony Pictures
• VHS Release Date: December 7, 1999
• Run Time: 123 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 3.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (230 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 0767834933
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #635,071 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com

This thoroughly unpleasant thriller from the hands of Joel Schumacher (Batman and Robin) offers very little in its lurid tour of snuff films and the seedy pornographic underworld. A wooden Nicolas Cage stars as a private detective hired by a tycoon's widow, who discovers in her dead husband's safe some 8mm footage of a young girl being sexually abused and slaughtered. Cage's job is to determine the veracity of the film and to find out the girl's identity, whether she be alive or dead. What could have been a taut, nerve-jangling thriller is instead a lumbering, overwrought but underwritten tale of vigilante justice. Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker also penned the imaginative and compelling Seven, but you wouldn't know it from this tired and monotonous script. Schumacher tries for echoes of both The Silence of the Lambs and Paul Schrader's Hardcore (which stars George C. Scott as a father trying to find his daughter in the seedy porn industry), but despite some slick camerawork, the film fails to draw the audience into either the mystery of the missing girl or Cage's supposed internal conflicts. It's not so much the unsavory subject matter as it is the sloppy and unimaginative filmmaking that makes the movie unbearable. Of the entire cast only Joaquin Phoenix, as a charismatic goth boy who works at an adult book store, comes away with a memorable performance. --Mark Englehart

From The New Yorker

When a big Hollywood picture starts courting the movie buffs in the audience, it must be in trouble; when it starts with a shot of a movie projector and boasts a hero called Welles, hold your nose. This grim new work from Joel Schumacher takes itself so seriously that there were reports of frivolous laughter in the theatres. The Welles in question, played by Nicolas Cage, is a private detective who is asked to watch a snuff movie and to find out just how snuffy it is-whether a young woman was actually killed onscreen. His quest leads him to Los Angeles and New York, and to a slow crawl through the belly of the porno industry. The problem here is not that Schumacher's approach is exploitative but that it's boring; poor Catherine Keener, playing Welles's wife, has the thankless task of sitting at home waiting for her man to call with yet more recitations of gloom. The usually sprightly Cage seems locked and barred; the only fun comes when he teams up with Joaquin Phoenix, a bemused observer of the hard-core scene. But not even Phoenix can save a film that solemnly fulfills everything you guessed in the first ten minutes. -Anthony Lane
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

14 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Not as bad as critics say it is., March 7, 2002

By 

Church of The Flaming Sword - See all my reviews

This review is from: 8MM (DVD)

I decided to watch 8MM on HBO late one night with an open mind. I actually glad that I did. It does have its faults. Nicholas Cage's performance as Tom Welles goes from one extreme to the other: he is both over-emotive at times and wooden at others. The pace is a little slow at times. And without knocking the actual quality of the film, it is not always easy to watch. Well neither is A Clockwork Orange, and that movie is a complete masterpiece. Then again, how can you make a film using the underworld snuff film trade as a backdrop easy to watch?

For those of you that want to write 8MM off as another Death Wish/Dirty Harry vigilante action romp, you're missing the point. If anything, 8MM is the antithesis to what those films are about. You see the possibly irreparable moral and psychological damage that Welles undergoes when he takes the life of homicidal underworld figure who has no qualms with doing away with Welles. Do you ever see a Clint Eastwood or Charles Bronson character racked with regret - even when you take into consideration the death of a truly despicable and worthless person? True enough, Welles never stoops so low as to murder an innocent law-abiding citizen, yet you see a dramatic change in his character as the film progresses - and not for the better.

Another thing that I liked about 8MM was Joaquin Phoenix's portrayal of Max California. On the surface, he is a tattooed punk rocker who works in an adult book store. But underneath, he is the moral compass of the film. You'll learn to like Max much in the same way that Welles learns to. While Max lives as a single man without much responsiblity, he respects Welles for his dedication to family life. I especially liked the scene in which Max and Welles meet for the first time - I shouldn't have to tell anyone what kind of magazine Max was hiding his Truman Capote paperback under. And let's not forget the memorable line about trying to "change the devil".

Before I sign off, I must caution you not to expect an easy lighthearted movie. Don't even expect an action flick. But if you want to check out something dark that will make you think and challenge you, you may want to check out 8MM.

Overall rating: 4.25 stars.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Honest view of society, September 5, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: 8mm [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Okay, hold on to your hats, this is a wild one. Nicholas Cage plays as a private detective, Tom Welles. Welles is hired by an elderly woman of wealth, to determine the validity of a reel of film she has found in her late husbands safe. Welles, travels from coast to coast to find the subjects on the film.

This is a disturbing film, and delves into the sleazier side of film making. There is scenes of nudity, sado/masochism, and other sick stuff. The critics didn't like this and many other movie reviewers also tore it up. It is a sick work, but a well done one.

If you want to see a happy film buy "You've Got Mail", or some other all the world is good and kind film. Sadly, this film touches close to the mores of our society, and nobody wants to deal with that. Thousands of Children and young adults, are abducted, or run away from home, and end up on the street and into the society shown by this film. This is a brutal honest look, at something we would rather not admit to. REVIEWED 9/5/99 BY JOHN

11 of 13 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant Sadeian Thriller, October 27, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: 8mm [VHS] (VHS Tape)

John Christian, billionaire, industrial czar, pillar of the community, respectable family man with three children, seven grandchildren, and a wife who loves him deeply, dies suddenly at the age of eighty-one. When the private safe in his study is opened, besides the expected cash, stock certificates, etc., a reel of 8 mm film is found, a film which depicts what seems to be the brutal murder of a teenage girl. Private Detective Tom Welles is hired by a disturbed Mrs Christian to find out if the film is a simulated killing, since she is a kind and caring woman who cannot bear the thought that it might be real.

So begins Joel Schumacher's 8MM, a movie which has all the ingredients of a succesful thriller: extreme brutality, multiple murders, torture, mutilation, blood, greed, sexual perversion, pornography, ****speak, and, to top it all off, the 'snuff' movie around which this film turns. But there is more. Not only are the acting, photography, settings, costumes, dialogue, pacing, and the haunting background music all superbly managed, but the movie is also that rarity among the torrent of mindless trash which Hollywood, in its extreme contempt for the modern audience, inflicts on us today: it is a movie with a deep, even profound, meaning, a meaning with cosmic implications. This meaning is one which will probably escape many viewers. It will not escape those who have carefully read Sade, a writer who has replaced Kafka as the key figure of the modern sensibility. Only Sade prepares us both to witness and understand the sort of horror that we find at the center of Schumachers brilliant metaphysical thriller, a thriller in which figures who seem to have stepped right out of Sade's 'Juliette' or '120 Days of Sodom' have been transplanted into the modern world.

Do not miss this movie.