Critics were unanimous in their disdain for Joel Schumacher's 8mm; I don't think I managed to find a single review, anywhere, with anything even vaguely positive to say. One can't help but wonder whether it was all some kind of cruel joke on the director's part that we all failed to spot; and, listening to Mychael Danna's score, it would seem that he was in on the joke. Who wants a good old-fashioned orchestral score when you can have synthesised textures and Moroccan instrumentation? Certainly not me! I just can't get enough dissonant reed instruments. Melodies? They're for ponces! Don't let any round me, for God's sake. Joel Shumacher's comment in the liner notes that Danna's music "transcends music for film" offers further evidence that the director is completely and utterly insane.

To be fair, Danna does introduce some much more interesting, and actually quite beautiful, music from time to time; "The House" and "Cindy" are especially attractive. Once it gets going, "Missing Persons" is a quite engaging action cue, with some interesting percussion arrangements, but you have to sit through two minutes of the most vile crap in order to get there.

If you have the stamina, you will find some fine music in 8mm, but the stuff you have to hear in between is the sort of music that drives people to suicide. Danna's a good composer - I particularly enjoyed his work on The Sweet Hereafter - but 8mm amply demonstrates everything that is wrong with modern movie music - doing things differently simply for the sake of doing them differently, rather than for any kind of dramatic reason.

Buy this CD by clicking here!