In
8MM, a widow asks private detective Tom Welles
(played by Nicholas Cage) to find out whether a film in the
safe of her late husband, in which a young woman is murdered,
is a real or simulated "snuff film." Her attorney Longdale
(played by Anthony Heald) picks Welles, as he seems to be
an amateur who will not find out the truth. However, Welles
assumes the film to be real and tries to track down the young
woman, starting with the Missing Persons Bureau in Cleveland
and ending up in the film capitals of Hollywood and New York.
Posing as a buyer of snuff films, he runs into the moguls
of the industry, Eddie Poole and Dino Velvet (played by James
Gandolfini and Peter Stormare), who in turn try to snuff him
out. Similar to the cop pursuing a sadomasochistic serial
killer of gays in William Friedkin's Cruising
(1980), Welles is negatively transformed by the quest to find
a Satan. The snuff film’s producer turns out to be the lawyer
who sends him on his way in the first place. The tagline of
the film is "You can’t prepare for where the truth will take
you," meaning that Welles learns that snuff films do exist,
and that the world of S&M snuff films is primarily for men
who lust for full control of women. Directed by Joe Schumacher,
8MM is film noir in which the hero triumphs
but the sickness of the porn industry seems beyond anything
that filmviewers may want to know about. The film is based
on the novel by Andrew Kevin Walker. MH
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