8MM Reviews

"I thought snuff movies were an urban legend," says minor-league private eye Tom Welles (Nicolas Cage), as a white-haired woman (Myra Carter) hands him the 8mm filmstrip she found among her late husband's effects. Sure enough, it looks like the hollow-eyed young girl onscreen is being horribly murdered. The elderly widow hopes it's a sick, slick fake and asks Welles to find the girl, launching a journey that takes him far from his loving wife (Catherine Keener) and baby, deep into the darkest heart of the smut business. Welles' guide to the underworld is Max (Joaquin Phoenix), who works in a dirty book store and knows the hierarchy of bottom-feeders, but isn't as hip to their vicious ways as he thinks. We know we've entered the realm of unthinkable human degradation as soon as everyone and everything gets ugly: pallid faces, greasy complexions, sweat and fat and pockmarks packed into red-lit rooms with papered-over windows. In the fashion of good men affronted by the world's cruelty, Welles will risk his soul to do right by the dead girl, and all roads lead to Dino Velvet (Peter Stormare), a swaggering, insinuating reprobate who does everything to announce his gleeful damnation but caper demonically and sing, "Please allow me to introduce myself, I'm a man of wealth and taste..." Now that Welles's eyes have been opened to the velvet underground, can he close them again? OK, the movie's message is unimpeachable (is anyone pro-snuff?), but the method is pure voyeuristic sleaze: Director Joel Schumacher orchestrates a good wallow in the neon slime followed by a cathartic purge. The superficially cheery BOOGIE NIGHTS is infinitely scarier: Its porn princes and princesses are eaten away by the self-delusion and insidious callousness of the sex business, convinced to the bitter end that they're doing fine.