It parses markups fine. Looks to me like your trying to do whole html code or something which its not going to do
http://www.reeftalk.com/reviews/revshow.php
Now I dont really know what else to say about getting line breaks that do not exist to show. Clearly looking at the review in the database there are as stated no line breaks or break tags so I dont know what makes space print on showproduct since there are no line breaks to convert.