8mm
What a great gem. Thematically extreme, but touches so many facets of human nature, it’s almost blissful. He who fights monsters…
Our hero is the fixer, one of those people the rich and powerful go to when something discreet needs to happen. He thinks of himself as a big wig, but the truth is not so glamorous: he’s just a middle class dude, with a working wife and a baby.
His big break comes when he us summoned by some local aristo, one of those with so much old money, their palatial estate has its own name, it’s a landmark. The patriarch died not long ago, so his wife rummaged through his papers and found an old Super 8 film, depicting at first a crude hardcore porno that turns into murder, a bone fide snuff film. It was stored in inner most sanctum of his, our hero’s job is to find the missing girl, to make sure she is alive somewhere.
He starts with local missing person reports, and after burning the midnight oil, he gets a possible lead, some teenager runaway. Her only next of kin is her mother, a cashier that lives in permanent angst over her missing daughter. The daughter was pissed about her stepfather, which left her anyway after a few months, which means the mother survives her depressing life on a crappy house, waiting for some news.
Our hero finds her secret diary, which leads to the local jail. She and her “boyfriend” had plans to get to Hollywood and start a career in showbiz, but he dumped her ASAP, referring her to his favourite titty bar. The hero returns to her mother, to let her know he’s on the case, to give her back the diary, and to being hit on by a desperate woman. Our hero declines her offer politely, and she gets even sadder.
Tinseltown is it. Our hero finds a lot of video nasty, but even the nastiest bondage shit is merely in bad taste, not actual depictions of murder for pay. There are even some Philippines-made fake snuff films, with minor production values. The white whale proves elusive, even with the help of his sidekick, blue-haired weirdo manning the adult bookstore. He is reading In Cold Blood with some porn dust jacket, to maintain the store cred.
Our guy finds a better lead. She did reach Hollywood, but instead of being captured by the star system, she went into the other camp, that requires less talent and money: porn. One thing leads to another, and she is quickly recruited to private events, including kinky sexual enactments with other, more extremely costumed ladies.
Our guys dig further, spread a lot of money around, and reach the original video creators. They schedule a new snuff creation, that seems to be the easiest way to flush them out. Our hero is extremely cautious and sends his blue-haired sidekick home, over his protests.
There is actually a triumvirate: the guy with a talent agency recruiting the talent, the pornomancer director guy, and Machine, the actual masked guy holding the knife. Our hero though of many things, but not that the old lady’s lawyer was so invested in the biz, and show up personally to see our hero get murdered on camera.
With such overwhelming force, the bad guys have the upper hand. They even capture and kill the blue haired guy, what a shame. They take and burn the original snuff film with the girl, they win! Our hero is in a desperate situation, and manages to turn the gang inwards by mentioning the million dollars in cash paid by the old man, pocketed by the lawyer.
With that apple of discord, the pornomancer and the lawyer kill themselves mutually. Our hero escapes in the nick of time, warns his family to run, and calls his employer to report the bad news: the snuff film is real, the girl was murdered, the old man was a sick fuck, a regular aristocrat. The old widow literally kills herself as he hears this news, leaving a mea culpa letter to the girl’s mother, and a wad of cash for our hero, with the single sentence: “try to forget us”.
The hero’s job is not yet done, there are two lose ends that require tidying up. Even if his wife says she is leaving, he goes ahead anyway. The dead girl doesn’t have anyone else. He goes on a rampage and deals with both the talent dude and Machine. Those are underwhelming conflicts, they are either money-grubbing sickos, or sickos without redeeming characteristics.
As the blue-haired dude says, he who fights monsters becomes one. Our hero did not manage to forget that, he will live with the consequences. At least his wife did not abandon him, nor does the girl’s mother hate him from springing the news on her in the middle of the night.
This is my place for ramblings about sequences of images that exploit the human visual limitation know as persistence of vision.