A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Exactly the movie you think it is, but not the movie you want it to be.

The film may be flawed, but its message is not.

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

I stumbled onto this while channel surfing and after sampling a few minutes I didn't want to turn it off. The all-too-familiar love triangle theme is played out with two best friends in high school, torn apart by sultry sexpot and fellow classmate Lily, who'll do anything (and any one) to get her out of this hick town. She bounces back and forth between confident jock Alex and his shy pal Cliff, who's always there to pick up the pieces when Alex lets her down. In spite of the strain Lily puts on their friendship the 2 boys manage to hang through it all - until Alex disappears after a hunting trip with Cliff. When Alex's body is found the police pick up Cliff immediately, as the love triangle was no secret to anyone. Before Cliff's arrest Lily had tried desperately to get him to confess, but to no avail. While almost everything points to Cliff as the culprit, Lily's father should also have been under suspicion, for he had threatened Alex to keep him away from Lily and he's also no slouch with a rifle.As the shooting was never shown, everyone's in the dark when the murder trial begins, including the audience. Lily's betrayal of gullible Cliff on the witness stand seams to be sealing his fate when he throws his hat in the ring for her yet again and decides to plead guilty to manslaughter to save Lily from further grueling cross-examination on the witness stand. His gallantry earns him 8 years in prison and left me wondering what about the ballistics evidence? The bullet(s) in Alex' body should have pointed to the culprit as the one who's rifle matched the bullets, but such trifles are never mentioned. Thus we never find out for sure who killed Alex, but at least the producers were kind enough to show the terms of Cliff's sentence in the screen credits at the end. And now that the movie's over, who killed Alex? I'm still wondering.The actors are quite competent and here's a chance to see a very young Christian Slater before he became famous. Tammy Lauren is fetching and believable as the poor "white trash" girl who knows what she's got and how to use it to bring the hormones of teen-aged boys to a boil. As Cliff's attorney for the defense puts it, she thinks she's been spending all her time looking for "L-O-V-E," when the operative word should be "S-E-X." The movies's final scene shows Lily, looking depressed and leaning against the mill where she lured the boys for those "love" trysts. Now she must face her own fate as a pariah, still stuck in this future-less town, knowing she's ruined lives and families. Clearly she's serving out her own sentence, but one feels it isn't long or harsh enough.

Good lord, what a terribly boring made-for-TV movie this was! I assume that all of the good reviews (of what few reviews their are to begin with) are from those who's nostalgic overload clouded good judgment because this certainly isn't anything I'd recommend to anyone was looking for entertainment.Based on a true story, Christian Slater, Brian Bloom, and Tammy Lauren play three high school friends in rural Georgia. Bloom plays the pretty boy jock who's chances of moving out of the Georgia town are high since college prospects come naturally to a football talent. Slater is socially inept and isn't likely to go anywhere. Like his dad, he assumes that people expect his only mobility beyond their town will be the state pen. And Lauren plays a naive teen who is desperate for the attention of Bloom's character. We've seen this a billion times before (Promised Land was one of the more depressing versions, and mostly told as an outcome of this narrative).So, Bloom's parents don't like Lauren's crazy father and forbid him from seeing her, which I suppose is fine with him since she won't stop nagging him about getting married. Meanwhile, Slater doesn't think that Bloom's character treats the girl (who he is secretly infatuated with) right and yada...yada...yada...you can figure out what he's on trial for murder (this being told in flashback format).Unfortunately, the characters are a bunch of self-important whino's, especially Lauren and Slater's characters. And characters like that evoke little empathy in a story where they may be misunderstood kids or whatever, so then what's the point? There is nothing remotely interesting, and very little social commentary to at least accompany the events. Sure, I got lured into it because it was a late 80s Slater and Bloom team-up, but you'd be wise to avoid the eighty minutes or so of boredom and take my advice--skip it.

Desperate for love is the emotional thriller that will force the viewer to question every loyalty they have ever had in life. While the cover for this movie claims that Cliff Petrie was "desperate for love" I personally believe that the true desperation was held within Lily Becker. Cliff Petrie gives us one simple example of pure, unadulterated love. Meanwhile Lilly Becker clearly displays fear, depression, and anxiety along with a cunning and seductive deception.

Okay, so the movie wasn't bad. It had an interesting plot and the actors shined. Christian Slater was excellent (was there ever a doubt? The man is a genius) and so was the rest of the characters. There was only one hole in the whole movie- the ending. It was just too "cliff hanger-ish" Sure, there was a definite outcome, but it didn't satisfy the viewer. It is not an awful movie (not like that sad Notting Hill) but it was no Double Jeopardy either. On a scale from 1-10 I would give it a 6. I don't think it would be a COMPLETE waste of time to see it.