8MM

Further proof that everyone in Hollywood is insane arrives with the release of the thoroughly loathsome 8MM, which several of the town's best-paid artisans actually think has a swell premise for a Friday-night popcorn movie. Ambitious but not-too-bright private eye Tom Welles (Nicolas Cage) thinks he's hit the jackpot when he's hired by a tycoon's widow to investigate a reel of film found in her late husband's safe, an apparent snuff film depicting the slaying of a teenage girl. To identify the girl and the film's makers, Welles spends weeks immersing himself in an underground of violent, illegal porn rings. The eager Virgil guiding the dour detective through smut hell is adult-bookstore clerk Max (Joaquin Phoenix, giving the movie's only lively performance). Moviegoers spend two hours vicariously wallowing in degradation before Welles tracks down the villains, loses all the evidence, then tracks them down again for the cathartically lethal climax. Bring a date.

How to explain this colossal waste of talent? The filmmakers seem to think they're being bold and controversial by exposing a scandal that even they assert is an urban myth, but nothing could be less risky than tantalizing viewers with glimpses of illicit thrills, then puritanically condemning those thrills. A director as preoccupied with glossy surfaces and pretty people as Joel Schumacher (the last two Batman movies) is ill suited to the grimy world of Seven screenwriter Andrew Kevin Walker, who's apparently working his way through his fingers to come up with his movie titles. But whereas the mystery in Seven involved larger themes and actual plot twists, everything in 8MM is prosaically just what it seems. The film really is a snuff film whose killer admits to Welles that he lacks a dysfunctional childhood or other trauma to explain away his crimes -- he simply enjoys killing. Welles also learns that the millionaire commissioned the film simply because he had the money to get away with it. Perhaps that was also Columbia Pictures' rationale. At the Campus, Showcase, Starcase, Tri-Boro, and Woonsocket cinemas.

-- Gary Susman