Prince Seahorse, the Prince's Wedding Dress (2018)

Take the film very very unseriously

My goodness, where to start? Hermaphrodite plot? Vampire guest star? Really poor production of this film?

Plot: This is a fairytale, and the plot is about the seahorse royalty being attacked by an evil uncle who wants to take over the crown. The queen saves her child and sacrifices herself, freezing the entire palace. Her son ends up on earth, in a magical academy along with an Egyptian mummy and an European vampire, learning spells to save his kingdom and his mother.

Now here's where the things get interesting: the prince is actually a hermaphrodite, so we can say F*ck you to the Chinese censorship of the same sex relationships and the prince can marry his beloved class mate from the academy in the end, as a female version of himself.

Of course, good conquers evil, love conquers everything, so the bad uncle gets cast away and all ends well.

Production value: very very poor production, you can see the wig line on the cast members, CGI is done horribly, the plot has some holes, and it all could have done better. The set looks like made out of carton boxes too.

Cast: they're trying to take themselves a bit too seriously to be fair, unless that's what the director told them to do. The script is nasty, so they don't have much space to show their talents. Few eye candies, so that helps.

Music: typical for this type of films, your regular mix of guzheng, string arrangements, and ballads here or there.

Overall: if you have nothing better to do with your time, or you are a fan of camp, as long as you're willing to overlook the stupidity of this, you might actually not hate it.

5/10

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A most enjoyable spoof of the genre

The previous review is so negative that I almost didn't watch it, but Deetsy must have still taken it far too seriously, despite cautioning you to take it "very, very unseriously". So bad, it's very very good!

I think the movie was intended as a spoof (the vampire and the mummy? Dead giveaways!). Obviously low budget, but bad CGI doesn't do any harm when the intention is to point out the ridiculousness inherent in the wuxia genre (which I love, but the way, but it can become very stick-in-the-mud at times).

Once you see it that way - it is hilarious, the slapstick hiding subtle humour and double entendres delivered in such a deadpan way that you have to be on your toes to catch everything. I think the actors must have struggled to avoid corpsing in every scene.

Prince Seahorse pokes fun at the magic and martial arts of far more serious movies and subtly undermines gender stereotypes. The interaction between the ML and Mo Ya is full of innuendo and the ML having instant sex changes inverts the romance theme completely. The movie also riffs on modern tropes such as the television game show presenter giving the hyped-up run-down of the masters at the academy (the three male masters are all deliberately ridiculous) and old-fashioned electronic music when the master "heals" Mo Ya . Powers and spells are instantly transferred at the wave of a hand - hello?

I might watch it again just to check what I missed in the first round.

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