Review of 8MM (1999) by Hindénbörg E — 15 May 2010

I'm on the fence about this one. For the first 95 minutes I thought, "Holy Shit! This movie is fucking awesoooome! I can't believe Joel Schumacher has made TWO good movies...The other of which being "Falling Down." ". Endquote.

It was turning out to be a surprisingly fun piece of Hollywood-Exploitation Trash, something that comes along fairly rarely ("Grindhouse" doesn't count; it tried too hard... and it sucked spidermonkey assholes). It was like "Cruising" but for heterosexuals and fans of mongoloid detectives. The sleaziness was right up-to-par to the way I usually like my trash cinema: sex-gimps, kids gettin' mutilated for fun & profit, oh, and retarded detectives...

Then when it turns into a revenge story....eh, it really shouldn't have done that. Nicholas Cage is great at playing retards, rednecks, and more retards (See: Raising Az, Vampire's Kiss, Wild at Heart), but you can tell that this movie derived from a script that was much better than Schumacher's execution (which is fine for the most part because, as I said: it's a fun exploitation movie), but when it decides to get all serious and contains scenes of Cage blubbering "DERRRGAAA YUURRRR SHHUSH KILT HERRRR" that's when it begins to take a turn for the worse, all in that last half-hour (Strangely enough, for different reasons,there's also a huge drop off in quality of Paul Schrader's "Hardcore" during its last half-hour as well, a film 8MM no doubt borrowed heavily from). Had this movie been made in 1975 with Lee Marvin in the part, and Monte Hellman directing it could have been great, for different reasons as to why the first 90 minutes were great.

But as it stands, as a mainstream trash movie, I liked it for the most part. Violence is awesome.