An example of a movie review. negative (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive).

A: Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II starts at the Hamilton High School prom of 1957 where Mary Lou Maloney (Lisa Schrage) is cheating on her date Bill Nordham (Steve Atkinson) with Bud Cooper (Robert Lewis). Bill finds out & is devastated, meanwhile Mary Lou is announced prom queen 1957 & takes to the stage to accept her award. Bill, still hurting, decides to play a practical joke on Mary Lou so he throws a firecracker on stage but the still lit fuse catches Mary Lou's dress setting it & her on fire, within seconds Mary Lou is toast. 30 years later & Hamilton High is soon to hold it's annual prom night. Bill (Micheal Ironside) is now the principal & has a teenage son named Craig (Justin Louis) who is dating Vicki Carpenter (Wendy Lyon) & are both planning on going to the prom together. Bud (Richard Monette) is now a priest, that terrible night 30 years ago still haunt both Bill & Bud. One day Vicki is looking around the schools basement when she discovers a large trunk which she opens, this turns out to be a bad move as the vengeful spirit of Mary Lou is set free & is intent on claiming her crown as prom queen & in her spare time sets out to avenge her untimely death. First up is Jess Browning (Beth Gondek) whose death is put down to a suicide, Mary Lou begins to posses Vicki's body as the night of the prom draws nearer. After disposing of some competition in the shape of Kelly Hennenlotter (Terri Hawkes) who tries to fix the prom so she wins. Mary Lou in Vicki's body is crowned Hamilton High prom queen which allows Mary Lou herself to come back from the dead to make an unexpected appearance & really liven the party up...

With absolutely no connection to the original Prom Night (1980) & directed by Bruce Pittman I thought Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II wasn't a particularly good film. The script by Ron Oliver concentrates more on supernatural elements rather than cheap teen slasher themes, whether this was a good or bad decision will depend on your expectations I suppose. Personally I found these different elements didn't really gel or work that well together at all. The whole film was far to slow to be really enjoyable, after the opening sequence where Mary Lou dies no one else is killed until the half hour mark & then the film plods along for another half an hour until Vicki is finally possessed & the film finally picks up momentum for the climax where an evil Mary Lou kills a whole one person at the prom before she is supposedly defeated, come on horror film fans you did expect that cliched 'killer not dead & ready for a sequel' ending didn't you? Don't expect a hight body count, just five throughout the entire film & none particularly graphic although I did like the way Monica (Beverley Hendry as Beverly Hendry) tried to hide in a shower room locker which Mary Lou crushed & resulting in poor Monica's blood oozing out. The supernatural side of Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II is depicted by Vicki having lots of hallucinations for the first hour & Mary Lou controlling objects during the latter stages including a couple of creepy shots of a rocking horse which comes to life, the blackboard scene is quite good as well as it turns into water & zombie hands drag Vicki into it. The slasher side of Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II isn't outstanding, I did like Mary Lou herself as she churns out the obligatory one-liners & she made for a good villain even if she didn't get to kill enough people. Oh, & yes I did get the running homages to various other horror film director's with almost all of the character's sharing last names with one, this obviously adds nothing to the film but is a nice little touch I suppose. The acting is OK but the normally dependable Micheal Ironside looks lost & uninterested almost as if he's asking himself what he's doing in this & if he'll ever work again. Forget about any gore, someone is hanged, there is a stabbing with a crucifix that happens off screen, someone is impaled with a neon light, a computer goes crazy & electrocutes someones face(!?) & Mary Lou bursts out of Vicki's body at first as a rotting zombie which was quite a cool scene. There are some full frontal nudity shots in the girls shower as well, if that's your thing. To give it some credit Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II is OK to watch, has reasonable production values throughout & is generally well made. Overall I was disappointed by Hello Mary Lou: Prom Night II, it was just too slow & ultimately uneventful to maintain my interest for nearly 100 minutes. I'm not sure whether it deserves a 3 or 4 star rating, I'll give it a 4 as there's nothing specifically wrong with it I suppose & I've sat through much worse films but it just didn't really do anything for me I'm afraid.
Q: What's an example of a movie review?
An example of a movie review is here: Someone told me that this was one of the best adult movies to date. I have since discredited everything told to me by this individual after seeing this movie. It's just terrible. Without going into lengthy descriptions of the various scenes, take my word for it, the sex scenes are uninteresting at best. Jenna in normal street clothes in the beginning was the highlight of the film (she does look good) but it's all downhill from there.
Problem: Write a positive (OPTIONS:
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- positive) movie review.

Answer: As I understand it, after the Chinese took over Hong Kong, the infamous Cat. 3 Hong Kong movies kind of disappeared. At least until now, and what an amazing movie this one is. I knew it was a rough crime drama going in, but being the first Cat. 3 I've purchased that's been made recently, I wasn't sure what to expect.

A Cambodian hit-man goes to Hong Kong to knock off the wife of a judge, who is also a lawyer. Turns out, the Judge made the arrangements for the hit-man, because she was divorcing the judge, and threatening to take all his money. This is all known within the first ten minutes, so nothing is being given away. After the hit, the cops locate the hit-man pretty fast, but in trying to arrest him, several police officers and civilians are killed. He eludes the police and now the race is on to catch the guy, before he escapes back to Cambodia. This is a movie that never stops, and hardly gives the viewer a chance to catch their breath. Yes, it is very violent and intense, many cops are killed, as the hit-man proves very very hard to track, and take down when they do locate him. Along the way, the hit-man in trying to hide in a dump, finds a women being raped and mistreated by some man. He helps her, and saves her from the guy, and she persuades the hit-man to take her along with him in his escape. I loved this movie, it's like a roller-coaster that just keeps moving and moving at high speed, as one incident leads to another, and the police at times are just as bad or worse as the hit-man. The acting is exceptionally good, and the location filming and photography is at time breathtaking. There's no let up in this movie, not even with the very very incredible ending. The ending is pretty much unbelievable, and also a fitting end to all the action and violence. Yes, the violence is brutal at times, but this is a very no nonsense crime drama, that will knock your socks off. "Dog Eat Dog" definitely needs a more widespread release, including an R1 release for sure. Great movie, highly recommended.
An example of a movie review. negative (OPTIONS:
- negative
- positive).

A:
If you've ever wanted to see a film that stresses style over substance, this is for you. To me, Son de Mar is beautiful to SEE, but there's precious little substance, unless mawkish, melodramatic, manipulative love yarns turn you on. This may be one of those famous 'chick flicks' you've heard so much about.

We're about half-way through this film before anything really happens: Ulises (Jordi Molla) goes out to sea looking for tuna, and doesn't come back, leaving his wife Martina (Leonor Watling) and son to fend for themselves. Then, in a furious six minutes of screen time, they bury Ulises, Martina gets married again, and her son grows into mid-childhood. This rapid transposition is jarring, to say the least, and very sloppy: after 40 minutes of more or less hanging around, we're suddenly into a full-blown melodrama, all in six minutes. I think this is called wayward narrative pacing.

Five years later, Ulises (as in the wandering superhero Ulysses; get it?), returns to his 'Penelope' (Watling) only to find she's married to Sierra (Eduard Fernandez), an inexplicably wealthy guy (what does he DO to earn all that dough?) who inexplicably keeps crocodiles as pets. When Martina, in great anger, questions Ulises about his absence, he tells her that he'll take her to the island of Sumatra someday and she'll understand EVERYTHING.

And here's the thing: he DOESN'T take her to the island of Sumatra. The reference just dies somewhere in the script. He DOESN'T really explain where he was and why he ignored his wife and child for five years. He DOESN'T acquit himself as an honourable guy, and the movie DOESN'T fill in the plot holes that are staring at us for at least half of the film. I can only assume that director Bigas Luna wants us to fill in the story lines with the mystical clues (fish, reptiles, the sea) he offers through breathtaking cinematography and evasive dialogue. It just doesn't work. The narrative 'arc' on this film ends up looking more like a wobbly clothesline.

I'm sure Jordi Molla is a good actor, but I just couldn't buy his Ulises as any kind of hero (which is what the original Ulysses was supposed to be). With moist sensuality, he spouts a short stanza of identical poetry from Virgil roughly 2,000 times and each and every time it excites Martina to explosive orgasm. This guy should be rented out to reinvigorate stale marriages. I'm sure Virgil would be impressed. He didn't get laid that often, as I understand it.

This poetic 'device' figures prominently in the film, and I had no choice but to assume it was a gender reversal of Ulysses' famous 'siren song' (i.e. beautiful maidens singing seductively to far-off sailors, who were doomed if they answered the, well, siren call). If this is what Bigas Luna is up to, you can see the problem -- he's offering convoluted symbolism in a snatch-and-grab attempt at High Art. Once again, it just doesn't work, at least in my eyes.

Watling is a beautiful and magnetic young actor, but she gives us a character here who doesn't seem to have much intellectual or even romantic depth. It's beyond me how she could desperately fall in love with a guy who sports a for-rent sign on his face (as in vacant), oily 1960s-style hair that looks more like seaweed, and one of those trendy 21st-century 'beards' (you know, four days' growth, no more, no less). He's SUPPOSED to be a dreamy kind of guy (I think), but those eyes of his suggest he might be suffering more from overexposure to a preposterous script.

But, don't despair, this film is great to look at. Just don't try to connect the dots on the red herrings or think too much about what you're hearing in the way of dialogue. You can do a lost of fast-forwarding on this film (particularly in the first 40 minutes) and you really won't miss much.