There's some spectacular full-frontal nudity in this movie. Wherever they found these women, I need to move there.

Everything that made the first movie good is trumped here. The movie likes to blunt its emotional impact at every turn. First, instead of being a  relatively innocent guy who encounters the evil lurking behind the sordid sex industry and being changed by what he sees, the movie here centers on two spoiled upper middle class people who like to spice up their marriage with sexual fantasies that become more and more sleazy. Second, unlike the first film, it's not even an imperative that blood must be shed in revenge by the end of the movie. In the first movie, an innocent was killed and someone sought to avenge her death by legal means until that became impossible. In the sequel, two spoiled rich people make a sex tape of themselves and it leaks out  and they don't want to ruin their reputations so they set out to find the people who are blackmailing them. Not nearly as sympathetic, is it? The two lead characters in this movie make a series of increasingly dumb and dumber moves which makes us question how they became highly respected in their fields of business when they're so clearly lacking in common sense. Hell, even Paris Hilton managed to turn around the negative publicity that arose from her sex tape and used it to catapult herself to stardom.

The couple decides that the wife needs to go undercover and pretend to be a stripper, a porn star, and a prostitute in order to infiltrate the group that is blackmailing them (um...what?)  Of course this great decision backfires on them, and soon one of them is kidnapped and the other must come to the rescue, and the audience falls asleep because they got tired of keeping track of this complicated mess long ago. The first movie worked, even when it was heavy-handed, because the idea of avenging the death of an innocent is so intriguing. Who wouldn't want to punish those who murdered an innocent girl to create a film for the sexual titillation of a rich old man?

That act of horrible violence fueled every plot twist in the original film, and the main character in the original made some smart decisions and any move he made that might have seemed stupid pales in comparison to the stupidity of the two main characters in the sequel. And there's no emotional impact to their journey; they're bored in their marriage and they decide to spice it up by having ever more sordid sex and taping it, and the tape gets into the wrong hands so they do everything in their power to get it back, no matter who has to get hurt of killed in the process. My heart weeps in sympathy. Add to this lack of any kind of sympathetic main characters or back story the fact that there are several ludicrous plot twists that make no sense and finally the charming way the plot only advances because the characters make brain dead moves, and you have a mess that's not worthy of even an in-name-only connection with the original.

The sex scenes in this movie aren't very good, since the two main actors apparently wanted to avoid displaying full-frontal nudity (they're far too respected for that, one would assume) so they left that task to the lesser actors in the movie, in particular one beautiful woman who appears, fully nude in a dance club, and inexplicably hands the husband a critical piece of evidence. When his wife asks how he got the evidence, he says "A naked lady gave it to me," and there's no more explanation than that. And that's just one example of the ludicrous plot twists in this movie. My question is, why include "twists" like this in the movie? Do the filmmakers think we're not going to notice when things happen that don't make sense? Is it supposed to be shocking that naked people walk around handing out crucial evidence; is this supposed to show the further descent of the main characters into sexual depravity or something? Because if you ask me, they were already pretty depraved when the movie began. All in all, this is a z-grade sleazy little movie with no art or nuance which uses the title "8MM 2" in hopes of cashing in on the name-recognition of the original. Skip it. It's not worth your time. Buy the two disc set like I did and use the second film as a coaster.

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