Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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26 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Good erotic thriller is somewhat eroded by pretense, May 4, 2003
Based on the book by Dorothy Porter, THE MONKEY'S MASK is a watchable but also rather pretentious "erotic" mystery.
When a literature student Mickey (Abbie Cornish) goes missing, the girl's parents hire lesbian PI Jill Fitpatrick (Susie Porter- I'm not sure if she's any relation to the author) to try and locate their daughter. The only evidence of her last appearance is a videotape of Mickey reading a sexually explicit feminist poem, which will offend prudes, but which personally I found quite amusing. They're just words, after all.
To try and piece together the clues as to Mickey's whereabouts Jill interviews the girl's lecturer Diana (Kelly McGillis) who has actually been encouraging her students to write like that. I wish my teachers had been that cool. Pretty soon Diana becomes the prime suspect. However Jill finds herself attracted to Diana; who is a straight married woman, and soon the pair begin an elicit affair which puts the whole case in jeopardy.
This Australian film is a bit pretentious, as with a lot of "art" movies, but THE MONKEY'S MASK does manage to keep viewers watching with its plot twists and tricky camerawork. It gets a few demerit points for the amount of awful poetry in the film, but on the plus side there are numerous lesbian scenes between McGillis and Porter. DVD extras include a short film by the movie's director, Samantha Lang, a Dorothy Porter interview and a reading from the book (which I found boring), as well as cast and crew bios and samples of songs from the movie's soundtrack.
THE MONKEY'S MASK is a good movie, but personally I found the poetry irritating. But that's just me, so if you enjoy and appreciate poetry, you'll probably raise my rating by 1 star. I'm just an uncultured chump anyway.
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12 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
very erotic, October 28, 2002
frankly, I just wanted to see this film for its eroticism, which I heard was incredible. but the story is actually a pretty entertaining one, albeit slow at times. i expected little, got more than i thought, but still, this flick is an easy rental at best. those are my two cents....
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13 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Painful Dialogue, Predictable and Slow, September 16, 2002
By A Customer
What a mess of a movie that likely had good intentions at the start..The dialogue is painful and cliche, the movie is slooow, the story predictable...an average mystery (thus makes it somewhat worth seeing...as was the organization of the film, though too sloow), it has an underlying lesbian theme, but the women had no chemistry,zero, had it not been that their clothes were off, you'd think they were just aquaintances....I don't reccommend this film too highly..friends came over my home and saw it, and were dissappointed as I was to show it (I warned them) It was nice to see Kelly McGillis playing the bisexual predator english professor, every young coed's fantasy..but even McGillis was held hostage by the material, primarily the screenplay...
Best to rent..
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