 Starring: Johnathon Schaech, Lori Heuring, Bruce Davison, Julie Benz
Director: J.S. Cardone
Year Of Release: 2005
Plot: An American diplomat and his soon-to-be wife are in Hungary and decide to have a wild threesome with a model before they get married. After their moment of madness, they return to normal life, only to discover that their liaison was taped and someone is trying to blackmail them. As a result they travel into the seedy underworld of Hungarian pornography, which ends up threatening both of their lives. |
What do you do when you make a movie that’s so crap you know nobody is ever going to want to watch it? Oh, and it’d help at this point if you have no scruples about disrespecting the movie-going public in general. Basically you do what they did with 8mm 2, which has to be one of the most shameless cases of a distributor trying to cash-in in recent years.
What happened was that Screen Gems, the arthouse division of Sony, bought the distribution rights to an independent erotic thriller called The Velvet Side Of Hell. Unfortunately it completely and utterly stunk to high heaven, tested horrifically badly with audiences, and would almost certainly have flopped at the cinema. They could have just released it straight-to-DVD under its original title or even completely buried it and never let the public see it (which happens to more movies than you’d think).
Instead what they did was realise that it was a tiny little bit similar to another Sony movie, 8mm, and so they changed the name to 8mm 2 and it magically became a sequel to the 1999 movie starring Nicolas Cage. The similarities aren’t even that great, with the only link being seedy underworlds and the vague themes of sex and death. Under those criteria they could have called the original 8mm, Basic Instinct 2, and claimed that it was a sequel to the Sharon Stone movie.
When they made the name change to 8mm 2, they didn’t film anything new, add anything to link it to the Nicolas Cage film or connect the movies in any other way. They literally just changed the title and a movie that was never intended to have anything to do with 8mm, became a sequel.
It was a truly shameless move, as it essentially tried to con fans of the first film into watching a stinker of a movie on the promise it was a follow-up to pretty good 1999 Joel Schumacher flick, when it was nothing of the sort. In short, don’t be fooled. Indeed the only reason I have a copy is because it came free in a box set with the first film.
Trust really is an issue between Hollywood and the public, and whether it’s studios trying to pass things off as something they’re not or them making endless movies on similar themes, each of them worse than the last, there’s an attitude that anything that will make you money in the short term is good, irrespective of how much you cheat the people who are ultimately paying your wages (i.e. the general public).
However the more they do to betray the trust of the audience, the more they’re going to annoy people and in the long terms they’ll lose out. 8mm 2 may be a relatively minor example of the way Hollywood often has a very short term-ist view and a seeming disdain, or at least disrespect, for its audience, but it’s evidence of an attitude that’s pervasive in Tinsel Town, and which may one day cripple if it ever goes too far and truly alienates the audience.
It reminds me a little of the banks before the economic crash. Pushing and pushing after short term cash, without thinking about what’s going to happen a few years down the road. As we all now know, it didn’t work out too well for the bankers, and it may be a dangerous attitude for Hollywood to have, as they still seem to believe that no matter what they do, the audience will always follow them and fall for even their cheapest tricks (which to be honest, we often do). But there’s no guarantee that’s true.
The worst thing is, The Velvet Side Of Hell probably did make a lot more money as 8mm 2 than it ever would have under its original title, so maybe it’s not really that surprising that Hollywood thinks it’s worth doing this sort of thing and will continue to do it.
TIM ISAAC
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