The Movie: This is a horrible movie in which Nicholas Cage stars as a private investigator who is hired by a wealthy woman to find out if an apparent snuff film she found after her husband died is real or not. What was supposed to be a quick and easy investigation quickly draws the detective deeper and deeper into the secret underworld of hardcore pornography.

This movie sucks on a number of levels. Number one, the plot starts out alright, but with each new twist, it just becomes more and more ridiculous, making the film more like a caricature of a horror movie than the suspenseful thriller it wanted to be.

Any sort of emotional content just seemed thrown in there, especially since near the end of the movie Nicholas Cage's wife has a "you can't keep treating us like this" type outburst suggesting that he was excessively dedicated to his work and gave no thought to his family (a la Al Pacino in Heat), but the rest of the film doesn't seem to establish that feeling, as Nick is always calling his wife, or calling and apologizing that he didn't call earlier, or looking at pictures of his wife and daughter... so it seemed like it came out of nowhere when his wife got angry with him and even suggested she might leave him if he didn't start letting her in his life.

Finally, I think that the subject matter of this movie was originally intended to be a lot darker and disturbing than it ended up being, but for whatever reason, it was watered down, whether for ratings, or marketing, or whatever, I don't know. But I just didn't feel like this movie went "all the way" with exploring this seedy underbelly of the porn industry.

To its credit, the movie was quite beautifully shot, and had some pretty cool lighting and stuff, but overall, this was a pretty sucky movie that instead of rising into a gripping climax, this movie spirals into the abyss of mediocrity as it goes along. My advice? Don't waste your time on 8MM.

The DVD: This is a dual-sided disc, with an anamorphic widescreen transfer on one side, and pan and scan on the other. The transfer is very clean, and although it does exhibit quite a bit of gradient stepping whenever there was light shining through fog or smoke, it is otherwise excellent, with no unnecessary processing, and a nice, clean, smooth look. A lot of this movie is dimly lit, and the DVD reproduced these difficult shots quite nicely.

The audio, though pristine, I think lacked a attention to the detail as far as the surround channels are concerned. Why make a 5.1 mix if a 2.0 mix is all you're going to effectively get anyway?

This disc includes a theatrical trailer and a making-of featurette, as well as an audio commentary track by director Joel Schumacher. Overall, I'd say it's a pretty great disc, but unfortunately, it's for a pretty crappy movie.