Prison Flowers movie review: Chrissie Chau, Gillian Chung play inmates in abysmally scripted ‘thriller’ that plays like a boarding school drama

1/5 stars

The women-in-prison subgenre of exploitation movies has long been a source of guilty pleasure. Such films typically feature gratuitous displays of sex and violence among bad**s female inmates who are seeking vengeance, going up against corrupt guards, or engaging in some good old lesbian fun.

The best-known Hong Kong example of this is probably 1988’s Women’s Prison, a frivolous but undeniably entertaining slice of action behind bars that saw Carol “Dodo” Cheng Yu-ling and Pat Ha Man-chik join forces to take on a vicious bully, played memorably by Lo Fan in her first big-screen role.

New director Lui Mei-fung’s Prison Flowers is, unfortunately, no more than a thoroughly inane attempt at reviving the subgenre in Hong Kong. While it adopts the same Chinese title as the original, the film is such a pale facsimile of that work that it makes Women’s Prison look like a bona fide genre classic.

Mrs Ball (Gillian Chung Yan-tung), the prison’s biggest bully, and her underlings immediately gang up on Tai. But just as swiftly, she makes use of her connections outside prison – again, never mind the specifics – to take over from Ball’s main rival, the worldly Mother Bo (Carrie Ng Ka-lai).

Yet Lui’s film lacks the sadistic action or edgy ambience that spices up most good prison stories, being so incompetently scripted as to make incarceration feel like child’s play. Prison Flowers makes so little of the friction between inmates and guards, it might as well be a boarding school drama.

The introduction halfway through of Butcher Wan (Rain Li Choi-wah), a psychopathic repeat offender, feels desperate, and any semblance of sensible storytelling is lost in the third act when Bobo (Jeannie Chan Ying) enters prison at the exact moment her estranged mother – Mother Bo – is released. She even joins up with Wan.

While Chau is watchable, and Ng adds heartfelt moments to the laughably absurd mother-daughter drama like the seasoned pro that she is, the rest of the cast are less effective.

Chung is hopelessly out of her depth as a gang leader, and Li’s performance – hamming it up ludicrously as the villainess – is cringeworthy.

On top of this, Prison Flowers takes its sweet time to trot out a series of nauseatingly dated statements about women’s relationships with men – literally all Tai and Ball talk about when they form an unlikely bond late in the film.

That’s hardly the worst of this movie’s many offences, though. In the end, what could have been trashy fun is really just trash.

1/5 stars

The women-in-prison subgenre of exploitation movies has long been a source of guilty pleasure. Such films typically feature gratuitous displays of sex and violence among bad**s female inmates who are seeking vengeance, going up against corrupt guards, or engaging in some good old lesbian fun.

The best-known Hong Kong example of this is probably 1988’s Women’s Prison, a frivolous but undeniably entertaining slice of action behind bars that saw Carol “Dodo” Cheng Yu-ling and Pat Ha Man-chik join forces to take on a vicious bully, played memorably by Lo Fan in her first big-screen role.

New director Lui Mei-fung’s Prison Flowers is, unfortunately, no more than a thoroughly inane attempt at reviving the subgenre in Hong Kong. While it adopts the same Chinese title as the original, the film is such a pale facsimile of that work that it makes Women’s Prison look like a bona fide genre classic.

Mrs Ball (Gillian Chung Yan-tung), the prison’s biggest bully, and her underlings immediately gang up on Tai. But just as swiftly, she makes use of her connections outside prison – again, never mind the specifics – to take over from Ball’s main rival, the worldly Mother Bo (Carrie Ng Ka-lai).

Yet Lui’s film lacks the sadistic action or edgy ambience that spices up most good prison stories, being so incompetently scripted as to make incarceration feel like child’s play. Prison Flowers makes so little of the friction between inmates and guards, it might as well be a boarding school drama.

The introduction halfway through of Butcher Wan (Rain Li Choi-wah), a psychopathic repeat offender, feels desperate, and any semblance of sensible storytelling is lost in the third act when Bobo (Jeannie Chan Ying) enters prison at the exact moment her estranged mother – Mother Bo – is released. She even joins up with Wan.

While Chau is watchable, and Ng adds heartfelt moments to the laughably absurd mother-daughter drama like the seasoned pro that she is, the rest of the cast are less effective.

Chung is hopelessly out of her depth as a gang leader, and Li’s performance – hamming it up ludicrously as the villainess – is cringeworthy.

On top of this, Prison Flowers takes its sweet time to trot out a series of nauseatingly dated statements about women’s relationships with men – literally all Tai and Ball talk about when they form an unlikely bond late in the film.

That’s hardly the worst of this movie’s many offences, though. In the end, what could have been trashy fun is really just trash.