8mm

After only two films, scriptwriter Andrew Kevin Walker's (Seven) gratuitously pessimistic worldview is already getting tiresome. Surveillance specialist Tom Welles (Nicolas Cage in earnest, straight-arrow mode) is hired by a recently deceased industrialist's widow after she finds in her husband's private safe what appears to be a snuff film depicting the murder of a young girl. "All I want to know is if this atrocity is fake," she tells Welles. "Please find her alive." With the help of an adult bookstore clerk (Joaquin Phoenix, who, with Chicago actress Amy Morton as the missing girl's mother, are the film's only saving graces), Welles descends into the horrific netherworld of pornography's extreme subculture. Beatings, torture and other un-pleasantries await. "There are things you're going to see that you can't unsee," Welles is warned at one point. The same could be said about any Pauly Shore film. Strongly not recommended. (K. Lee Benson)