'Se7en', 'The Bone Collector', '8mm', "The Number 23'

Seven (aka ) (1995, New Line Cinema, dir. David Fincher) is the classic film of this genre. Here a serial killer knocks off his victims according to the recipes of the Seven Deadly Sins. For example, for “Gluttony” the victim is forced to eat himself to death, until his stomach explodes. For 'Sloth' the victim is tied to his bed for a year—and suddenly gets up like a vampire—one of the scariest scenes in movies ever. Another victim ('Envy') has his sides flayed. And so on. Morgan Freeman and Brad Pitt make a great tag team—Brad Pitt’s real life broken arm written into the script. There is one bizarre scene toward the end where both Freeman and Pitt shave their chests (as if there was anything there in the first place) in order to tape hidden microphones for wearing wires. There are easier places to wear them.

The Bone Collector (1999, Universal/Columbia, dir. Phillip Noyce) is another film with this plot outline. Two cops (Denzel Washington, as a quadriplegic and Angelina Jolie) track down a subway serial killer. One victim was tied down and eaten to death by rats, another was scalded by steam, a third would have been drowned. There is a hidden rune that forms an important clue.

8mm (1999, Columbia, dir. Joel Schumacher) is another thriller based on a number. Here Nicholas Cage plays private detective Tom Welles, hired to determine whether or not a particular snuff film found by a widow is a “for real.” Of course, this will lead him down a path himself. Joaquin Phoenix plays as a porn distributor. The film goes into interesting byways, even with an intriguing scene involving a prison janitor.

The Number 23 (2007, New Line, dir. Joel Schumacher) once again plays with digits. But really that is just a ruse for a more clever idea. A dog catcher Walter Sparrow (Jim Carrey) becomes obsessed with a ratty red book that his wife (Virginia Madsen) finds in a used 'make up your mind' bookstore. It is self-published and self-printed, and that doesn’t even mean Kinkos copied. Rather, it looks like a typewritten original. The book has 22 chapters that describe an unsolved murder, and Walter starts to notice more than coincidental similarities to his own life. It even is officially published. (I don’t know whether it has an ISBN). There is a lot of numerology about the mysterious number 23, that even his gifted teenage son (Logan Lerman, very much like “Bobby” in the WB series) picks up on. Walter visits the convicted murdered in prison, and the man maintains his innocence. Even his mother won't visit him. Now Sparrow is trying to get it. In fact, that majestic pooch that he can never catch (and who bit his arm) is on to him. (Carnivores know everything – just as cats do.) It turns out that the last chapter of the book is handwritten underneath wallpaper, on toilets, even on his body. Get it? And all of this story takes place in the age of Internet and computers, that are completely ignored. (Why doesn’t the son Google the murders?) Yet, it is interesting how people will write and self-publish today, in blogs and on social networking sites, to be noticed, even incriminating themselves, or pretending to incriminate themselves ('dreamcatching') to make a point. This movie plays on that point with a dark film noir genre picture that doesn’t quite work because it seems set up and clunky (although 8mm actually has a similar premise and works quite well), but why not make up a film with this premise based on Myspace?

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