Andrew Worsdale Movie of the week
In a matter of a fortnight we have seen the release of The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Bride of Chucky and now 8mm – all movies that revel in the art of salacious gore and sadistic voyeurism.
A forerunner to all these was Peeping Tom, Michael Powell’s 1960 masterpiece which had Carl Boehm as a worker on film sets devoted to the creation and recording of extreme emotional situations, including death. The anti-hero is consumed with voyeurism. This is triggered by his childhood experiences at the hand of his psychologist father who places a lizard on the kid’s bed in order to guage the “temperature” of human fear. When he grows up he has a compulsion to kill and carries an 8mm movie camera and a tripod with a stake in it, and he kills his victims (mainly prostitutes) while filming them.
When Powell, arguably Britain’s most visionary film-maker, made Peeping Tom, his career went on the rocks as the public and punters were outraged. Many critics saw the film as an attempt by Powell to equal the horror of Hitchcock’s Grand Guignol thriller Psycho, which was released in the same year; but Peeping Tom is far more disturbing.
When American mainstream studios, on the other hand, try tackling transgressive issues like sex and death, voyeurism and the camera, they inevitably cop out and make things comfortable and middle-class. There are some exceptions, like indie film- maker Gregg Araki, whose The Doom Generation was like Natural Born Killers with a sense of humour, involving decapitation, ejaculations and major sacrilegious spectacle.
Joel Schumacher’s 8mm attempts to be as shocking and ground-breaking as the afore- mentioned movies, but it fails. Although it deals with how nasty people can be when it comes to pornography and violence, it remains a mediocre thriller – interesting subject matter that is compromised by mainstream Hollywood’s insistence on making everything hunky-dory even when a teenage girl is getting slashed to pieces while she’s raped.
Screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, who wrote Seven, has not come up with the same sense of sleazy exuberance with the script for 8mm; but that may well be Schumacher’s fault.
The story revolves around a private investigator, Tom Welles (played by the always engaging Nicolas Cage), who lives with his wife, Amy (Catherine Keener), and their baby daughter in a small Pennsylvanian town. He is employed by a wealthy widow who wants to know why her late, rich, powerful husband had a reel of film in his private safe that appears to be a snuff movie.
Welles believes that a genuine snuff movie – porn where usually the female protagonist is killed on camera – is the stuff of urban legend, but through his investigations he discovers the identity of the young girl who is killed and realises it’s for real. His investigation leads him to the seedier parts of Los Angeles, where he finds himself increasingly disturbed by the amoral and nasty goings-on.
There are some parallels with Paul Schrader’s 1978 Hardcore, which had George C Scott as a Calvinist preacher whose daughter escapes from a religious education camp and surfaces in a porno film. Scott’s character impersonates a seedy producer and tries to infiltrate the porno industry in order to locate his daughter. Hardcore is more successful than 8mm, partly because Schrader bases his film on a strong moral, even religious base, which Schumacher’s movie lacks.
But Schumacher has never been noted for doing anything ground-breaking. Dying Young had Julia Roberts looking after a millionaire’s dying son – it was immeasurably coy and plain embarrassing. A Time to Kill, based on John Grisham’s novel, had Schumacher tackling vigilantism and racial issues in a movie that was filled with major histrionics and platitudes.
8mm has the potential to be a very powerful film. It mentions the fact that about one million children go missing in the United States every year; but the film ends up using its sensational subject matter simply as a “wardrobe” for a simple detective thriller. What’s worse is that Cage, who has shown in the past that he can go to the edge in films like Leaving Las Vegas, seems compromised by being the happy, family man confronted by sleaze. We know Cage as a movie star can revel in sordidness. Perhaps he should have played the porno director – which is played by a predictably over-the- top nasty Peter Stomare.
It’s a contrived attempt at investigating what is indeed a real problem – look up snuff movies on the Net and you’ll find thousands of sites dedicated to abuse, murder and sexual arousal through brutal sadomasochism. But Schumacher doesn’t exploit (forgive the pun) this material – he does the Hollywood sentimental thriller cop-out.