Tom Welles is a pretty normal guy. He works as a surveillance specialist from his clapboard house in Pennsylvania, which he shares with his wife and baby daughter Cindy.

There's no glamour, no veneer of tough-guy machismo. When he's away on a job they call each other every day to reaffirm their love. The most he has to put up with is his wife badgering him about his inability to give up smoking.

Then one day he's called up by the newly-bereaved wife of an industrial tycoon. Among the stocks, bonds and cash in his private safe is a can of 8mm film.

The film appears to show a girl being slashed to death by a masked man. The widow hires Welles, no expense spared, to find out the girl's identity, whether she really was killed, and why the film was in her husband's safe.

He answers all these questions in the end; but to get to the truth he first has to undergo a mind-mangling odyssey to the lower depths, where life counts for nothing, where money is power, and where power means doing evil for the sheer pleasure of it. Truth all but destroys Tom Welles.

After his ordeal he walks into his home, picks up his baby for a moment, and then falls sobbing into his wife's arms crying, "Save me, save me." He's still got enough humanity left to hold on to the belief that love is more powerful than evil.

This is a dark film with a repellent subtext - snuff movies - but director Joel Schumacher restricts the voyeuristic element to the necessary minimum to tell the story. In the course of his investigation, Welles, played by Nicholas Cage, has to watch a number of underground hard-core porn movies. Most of the time, however, the camera focuses on his reaction to what he's seeing.

The movie is shot in sombre shadowy colour for most of its 123 minutes. The only redeeming feature occurs in the very last sequence. There's little else of that nature from the first time Welles views that 8mm film until the last couple of shots.

We watch him being taken over by his search for the victim's identity, and then by the search for her torturing killers. His personality undergoes changes as he searches heart-breaking missing persons files, visits the murdered girl's home, and enters the nether world of porn movies; he forgets to ring home, he takes risks, he becomes obsessed with the need to know why the girl was killed in the way she was - as though that knowledge will at least help him come to terms with wickedness.

But as Welles gets closer to the truth the audience becomes aware that he is being watched by a shadowy figure.

While not as heart-thumpingly claustrophobic as some scenes in The Silence of the Lambs, 8MM is not a movie for those easily disturbed by the idea of sado-masochism.

Though the film did not frighten me, it left an impression for several hours afterwards - principally unutterable sorrow for the real-life victims of sadists.

Jim Greenhalf

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.