TheRetroCritic

Pretty much every Nicolas Cage movie these days is packed with little glorious Cagisms so you'd expect a film by Joel Schumacher, the man behind Batman & Robin  (and other, admittedly better films) to offer us a good bunch of those and yet 8MM is actually disappointingly low on Cage lols. This is quite probably because it's a decent flick with a darker plot and a Roman Polanski-esque tone throughout making it difficult to burst out laughing constantly Wicker Man -style. The plot follows Tom Welles (Cage), a private investigator, as he investigates a snuff film in which a young girl could have been killed for real. This search takes him down a sleazy road he's obviously not used to and to a grim underworld he never knew existed. On the way, he gets the help of a sex shop clerk with the hard-to-forget name of Max California (the ever brilliant Joaquin Phoenix) and has to deal with a good bunch of dodgy, twisted characters. It's one of those descent-into-hell typ