Author: Jim McLennan

A Killer Rising

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★★½
“FBI Agent Jekyll and Hyde”

At least a star of the above rating is purely for the concept, which is one just brimming with potential. The problem here is entirely down to execution that isn’t just lacklustre, it’s entirely devoid of all lustre. First and foremost, there is absolutely no reason for this to have a running time of 122 minutes, especially when the first half makes its point inside about ten, and then sits there, as if waiting for a bus. It’s a particular issue, because it’s only the second half where things get adequately interesting. You will need a great deal of patience – or, probably more likely, some household chores to take care of – in order to reach that point.

The heroine is Kacee Rhona (Beckly), an irascible FBI agent with a long history of disciplinary issues, going back to her days at Quantico. It’s perhaps not surprising, considering her childhood was a hellish landscape of abuse, from which she barely escaped at all, only after defending herself against her biological father. You do wonder how someone with such obvious psychological issues was accepted into the FBI, but whatevs. Seems she’s quite good at her job, and is now hot on the trail of a serial killer, Montague (Anderson) who has been kidnapping, raping and murdering (not necessarily in that order) a slew of women. It’s largely your standard “loose cannon with issues” thriller, with which we’re all (overly) familiar. While Beckly is… okay, the rest of the cast are well short of convincing, and the production’s resources are insufficient for what it’s trying to do.

Then, however, the killer brutally attacks Agent Rhona, leaving her literally dead for several minutes, and causing something inside her to snap. She becomes a vigilante while officially on sick leave, targetting those whom the law has not been able to punish. And who better to become a serial killer of serial killers, than someone trained to catch serial killers? It’s a bit like an unhinged, female version of Dexter, and is an awesome concept. Her colleagues are… well, for obvious reasons, somewhat ambivalent about this, when their suspicions are drawn towards one of their own kind. On the other hand, Rhona’s operation outside the law has its advantages, especially with Montague still on the loose.

I’d love to see this given the production it deserves, with a better supporting cast, and elements that accurately reflect the supposed FBI setting, which never reaches even “unconvincing”. It feels like a nicely twisted take on Silence of the Lambs, and I could imagine a young Jodie Foster or Angelina Jolie in the role of the heroine. But any remake would also need to go at the script with a pair of garden shears, removing all the extraneous nonsense which drags the front hour down to an uninteresting crawl. There was eventually marginally enough here to keep me going, yet I’d not blame anyone if they chose to cut their losses before that point.

Dir: Michael Fredianelli
Star: Stacy Beckly, Derek Crowe, Kevin Karrick, Jaren Anderson

Hyde

  By

★★½
“Hyde and sick”

This gets off to an impressive and intriguing start. Cora Fisher (Pribilski) has a perfectly normal life. Then, she’s involved in a car crash. The next thing she knows, she wakes up in a hospital bed. Oh, to which she is handcuffed. Before she can come to terms with that, she is informed that ten years have passed. And completing the triple-whammy, Texas Ranger Jim Krueger (Llorens) enters, and tells Cora he’s going to make sure she gets the death penalty for the murders she committed. It’s safe to say, the movie has successfully gained my attention by this point. Guided by mysterious cellphone texts, Cora escapes the hotel and goes on the run, seeking to find out the truth about what happened. 

It would be almost impossible for any film to live up to what is a cracking opening 20 minutes. You’ll perhaps have guessed from the star rating above, this certainly doesn’t. Part of the problem is the decision to leave Cora, when simply experiencing proceedings from her perspective would perhaps have been best, the audience discovering her past alongside her. Instead, it diverts into considerably less interesting areas, such as following Krueger. You’ll be forgiven if you’re making gestures towards your television set, trying to guide the plot back towards the heroine. The other problem is, when it does eventually get back there and resolution is obtained, the answer is considerably less interesting than the question. For spoiler reasons, I won’t go into detail, but it fell short of convincing to me.

I think the script ends up being pulled in too many different directions, and us not being able to do justice to many of them. For instance, there’s an odd Purge vibe, with people in masks, going round killing people with apparent immunity. It’s an angle that doesn’t seem to fit the psychological slant to much of the proceedings, and nor does it particularly appear to add extra value. The film is technically solid, and Pribilski does well enough in a role that must have been a dramatically challenging experience. The rest of the cast are largely functional. It does feel they are more like plot devices made flesh, there to move the story along.

But in the end, it is that story which represents the movie’s biggest problem. I’m always dubious about amnesia as a device. It often feels a lazy way for film-makers to generate mystery, which can then be equally easily solved by the protagonist miraculously remembering things again, as and when needed by the plot. This is a good example of that: without the convenient medical condition, the movie would have been over in about ten minutes. If you’re going to use it, the payoff has to be adequate for the disbelief you ask the audience to suspend. That definitely isn’t the case here and, despite some positives, this founders as a result, and struggles to make it over the finish line. 

Dir: Dallas Burgess
Star: Kelsey Pribilski, Chip Llorens, Avi Lake, Diana Rose

Burn It All

  By

★★
“Ashes to asses.”

I will say, I did actually enjoy this rather more than the rating above indicates. For pure entertainment value, it’s a 3 to 3½-star entity, when watched as a brutal parody of new feminism. The problem is, I don’t think those involved with it were making a parody. As a serious statement about gender, it’s almost impossible to take seriously. Alexandra Nelson (Cotter) is at the end of her tether, when she gets a call that her long-estranged mother is dying. Driving home to pick up the body, she finds it being hustled out the back of the crematorium. Turns out to be part of an organ harvesting scheme, run by the local crime bosses. This gives Alex something to live for, and she begins a one-woman campaign to take down the perpetrators. But that’s a mission which will drag in her estranged sister, bikini barista Jenny (Gately), into peril as Alex’s targets respond to her actions.

There’s a decent idea here, and in stuntwoman Cotter, a lead actress capable of delivering the necessary brutality. The action is pretty good, with an impact in excess of the usual low-budget entries. The problem is a genuinely terrible script, with Alex going from suicidal to unstoppable avenging angel at the drop of a mother she hasn’t talked to in years. It also needs more background for her remarkable ass-kicking than a spell in basic training, in order to justify the ease with which she takes down multiple opponents, close to double her weight. But then, if they’d done that, then Alex’s lifetime Gold Level membership in the Victim Club would have been jeopardized; why submit to the patriarchy in every avenue of life, when you could just have beaten it up? Because the story needs her to be both victim and victor – an awkward contradiction it fails miserably to address. Though even this could have been worked around, if she’d let her actions do the talking.

However, Alex is a mouthy bitch, to put it mildly. No fight is complete, unless preceded by a lengthy debate with her male target, which inevitably ends in them getting angry at her speaking “truth to power”. All the men in this are sexist pigs. Every. Single. One. Even the toddler, or the random guy passing her car on the freeway. It’s a ludicrously shallow approach, which you know will be lacking in nuance from the moment someone unironically uses the word “libtard.” After repeated comparisons of guns to penises, hysterical laughter is the only credible reaction when Alex comes out with arguably the most supremely cheesy pseudo-feminist line of all time, snarling, “Anything you can do, I can do bleeding”. I’m sure there are viewers, likely those who live on Twitter and Reddit, who might believe this to be a documentary. Anyone with an ounce of sense though, may well wonder how much its heroine’s obvious hair-trigger caused, rather than solve, her many issues.

Dir: Brady Hall
Star: Elizabeth Cotter, Emily Gateley, Ryan Postell, Elena Flory-Barnes

The 355

  By

★★★
“Mission reasonably possible”

I went into this preparing to hate it. There had been red flags all over the place, such as star and producer Chastain coming out with comments about her movie like, “It’s very important for society. We’ve moved against the status quo, and we’re creating our own narrative for it. The film is, in some sense, a political act.” Uh-oh. No film is ever “very important for society.” It’s a film. The good news, however, is this is perfectly watchable without worrying about such things. While it may have been created as a female-led story, it’s much more identifiable as a generic spy romp, in which the protagonists roam the world in pursuit of some threatening item, on which the bad guys want to get their hands. Hooray for the equality of mediocrity!

In this case, Item X is a black box that lets its owner do anything at all on the Internet, from hacking emails to crashing planes. It was found in a raid on a Colombian drug lord’s lair, where it came into possession of a soldier who now wants to sell it. Initially, a deal is brokered to sell it to the CIA, and agent “Mace” Browne (Chastain) is sent to Paris to complete the transaction. However, the meeting goes badly wrong, so Browne has to team up with a United Nations of other intelligence operatives, to stop it falling into the wrong hands, which could bring about unspeakable horrors. Such as nobody being able to post their thoughts on Twitter.

It’s all rather predictable, and quite remarkable how, after being cut off by the CIA, Mace is still able to commandeer aircraft and whatever other resources she needs. As the tagline above suggests, it’s all more than a bit evocative of another spy franchise in tone, though in most ways, feels like a Good Value version thereof. Chastain isn’t quite Tom Cruise; Nyong’o isn’t Simon Pegg; and so on. There’s not a great deal of emotion to be found either. The only one who feels properly human is Cruz, and her character is a psychiatrist, unfortunately entangled in the operation, rather than a field agent. The others feel more like high-functioning AIs, programmed to do their jobs.

The action scenes, however, are thoroughly professional and well-staged. There are some early chases around Paris which are approaching top tier, and plenty of bullet-spraying action for the finale. Though Chris has asked me to inform you that, if you have a hand-to-hand fight on a balcony, the rules of action cinema require someone to go over the edge. She was disappointed by the wilful disregard to tradition shown here. In general though, this was acceptable entertainment, and outside of a couple of sentences of dialogue, did not seem obviously preachy. That title, however: painfully obscure, and not explained until far too late. Still, this likely did not deserve the dismal box-office fate which it suffered. Perhaps the audience’s refusal to buy tickets to see it was, in some sense, a political act?

Dir: Simon Kinberg
Star: Jessica Chastain, Penélope Cruz, Diane Kruger, Lupita Nyong’o

Helga, She-wolf of Stilberg

  By

★★
“Great poster. Shame about the film.”

I guess this shows that the concept of the “mockbuster” is not something invented by The Asylum. This came out in 1978, the year after the Ilsa franchise had come to an end with Tigress of Siberia. But France apparently decided it wanted to get into the act, and created its own knock-off Ilsa, in the shape of Helga (Longo, who has a cameo early on in Bruce Lee’s Way of the Dragon, and was also in War Goddess). What this does, is mostly act as proof of just how damn good Dyanne Thorne was in her role. She may have been unable to pronounce “Reich” consistently, but she went at the part with gusto, and had an amazing amount of presence, essential to the job. Longo simply doesn’t, and as a result, this is largely pedestrian and dull.

Opening with a sprightly and thoroughly inappropriate intro tune, we find ourselves in a cabinet meeting in an unnamed dictatorship. Names like “Helga”, as well as the angular uniform patches, suggest somewhere Fascist, but the bearded, cigar-smoking leader and his #2 called Gomez indicate a Cuban influence. Whatever. Helga is assigned to run the castle turned political prison in Stilberg, which appears to contain… Oh, maybe a dozen female inmates, tops, who are occasionally shipped out to a nearby farm. Though what they do there, apart from getting sexually harassed by the farmer – called “Doc” for no apparent reason – is unclear. The latest prisoner is Elisabeth Vogel (Gori), daughter of a rebel leader. Helga is intent ob breaking her, but Elisabeth has her own plans, assisted by a guard (Allan) who is secretly on her side.

Let’s be clear: Helga would be chewed up and spat out by Ilsa, in about five seconds. To start with, there’s her fashion sense: we first see her in a floral dress more befitting a PTA meeting. Ok, it’s a cabinet meeting, but would Ilsa have cared about that? While Helga does eventually slide into a pair of tight leather pants and a red shirt, if you’re going to embrace the S/M aesthetic, you need to do so wholeheartedly. But the most embarrassing scene sees Helga break down in tears on her bed, just because a prisoner has said some mean things to her. C’mon. What self-respecting villainess would ever do that?

There is an underwhelming lack of imagination in the sadism here too. No medical experiments or hanging them on blocks of ice here, just some light whipping. The nudity is copious, with forest in Amazonian quantities, if you know what I mean, and I think you do. But it, too, is almost as tedious as the over-frequent shots of truck convoys, going from castle to farm – or, for a bit of variety, farm to castle. I will say, the production values are decent, and the castle is a better location than Ilsa managed (recycled sets from Hogan’s Heroes!). But the pretty sheen cannot conceal the boredom and lack of invention at its heart.

Dir: Patrice Rhomm
Star: Malisa Longo, Patrizia Gori, Richard Allan, Dominique Aveline

Pablo’s Apprentice: Where Romance Meets Revenge, by Richard DeVall

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Literary rating: ★½
Kick-butt quotient: ☆☆½

The author said “I became disillusioned with thrillers that used a formula… and wanted something fresh.” The concept here is certainly a novel one. It begins with a robbery carried out by two women, Rose Alvaro and Little Bee, in California, which leads to the death of a police officer. The cop’s fiancée, Brandy Bednarz, is destroyed by his death, and moves across country, eventually beginning to rebuild her life over the following years. But in one of those “nobody would believe it if it was a novel – oh, wait it is” coincidences, when Rose and Little Bee pull of their next heist, it’s right in Brandy’s neck of the woods.

Only, this time, she is instrumental in the death of Little Bee. Rose knows it, too, and vows to go after Brandy, making her pay by killing everyone associated with her. Brandy, however, is not going to sit idly by, and by the end, takes the fight to Rose, in her hiding place on the other side of the world. The subtitle on the book (as opposed to the cover), is “Where insane meets intellect”, and that may be more accurate. As noted, it is an original concept, even if plausibility is stretched thin, almost from the get-go.

The main problem is execution that is flat out painful, to the point where it overwhelms the positives. First off, there are an embarrassing number of typos and other errors here. The very first sentence refers to the helicopter manufacturer “McDonald Douglas”. D’you want fries with that ‘copter? I also suppressed a derisive snort at someone “shooting heroine”, “marring Brandy” (instead of marrYing), “a celestial seen of a galaxy” and “a social click”. But where typos and bad research finally had to give way to a poor grasp of English, was when somebody was described as “Hiding in plane site.” Really? I would have been embarrassed to write that at age 11.

To a large extent, the same goes for the characterization, particularly of Rose. Now I am not a minority woman: as far from it as imaginable, in fact. However, even to me, it was highly obvious that neither was the author, to the extent it felt as if he may never have met one. I was thoroughly unconvinced that Rose’s thoughts, actions or dialogues had any degree of authenticity to them. Brandy was a little better in this area, and her reaction to the multiple traumas did feel credible. Though even here, the author throws a brutal sexual assault at her, which doesn’t seem to serve any purpose except for being another unpleasant experience for her to go through.

Given that, it would have been nice if the book had finished with her being able to obtain closure, in the form of Brandy personally delivering her revenge to Rose. No such luck. She gets eaten by a crocodile. Whoops, I’ve spoiled it. What a shame.

Author: Richard DeVall
Publisher: Independently published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Stand-alone novel.

Violet

  By

★★
“Love the poster. The film? Not so much.”

There’s a decent idea here, and an attempt to add some new wrinkles to that old reliable, the rape-revenge genre. Unfortunately, there are too many problems and missteps to make this a worthwhile entry. Violet (Winkler) is an aspiring actress, whose dreams are shattered when she falls for a fake audition. She is lured into a basement, raped, and the resulting footage posted on a highly-dubious website. She’s clearly broken by the trauma, to the increasing worry of her mother (Burns). But hope is present in her growing relationship with Josh (Crowe), a young man she met at the lake where Violet likes to sit, trying to find some measure of peace. However, how will he react when he finds out about her other life, in which she is making those responsible for the assault, pay.

The main theme this seeks to illustrate, appears to be the proverb about revenge and digging two graves. There’s not much uplifting about the process through which Violet goes, and you’d be hard pushed to argue that, at the end, she finds herself in a better place. She may have made her attackers regret what they did, in no uncertain fashion. [Ironically, she posts the resulting videos on the same site, and acquires a bit of a cult following as a result.] However, it doesn’t fix the problem: her thespian ambitions, for example, can never be restored to what they were. Indeed, there turns out to be a high price to be paid, though it has to be said, this results from one of the more unlikely plot twists I can remember.

That development is just one of the problems with this, which managed to keep taking me out of the narrative, just when it seemed to be pulling me in. For example, Violet’s “mother” looks, acts and sounds about three years old than the 21-year-old heroine, and is so unconvincing in this role, she sticks out like a sore thumb. The extended chit-chat between Josh and Violet also rarely surpasses the level of of his self-composed poems. At least they nailed the bad teenage verse aspect: I literally LOL’d at his rhyming of “shoulder” with “boulder”.

I’m not sure about Winkler’s performance, which is hurt by inconsistency. There are points when she seemed thoroughly believable, selling the pain of her experiences. Yet, two minutes later, it was as if a switch had been flipped and no trace of the trauma could be seen. While that may have been a deliberate dramatic choice, it feels false. I did appreciate, however, the decision to leave the rape almost unportrayed. We see only a fraction of the resulting video on the Internet, and I’m fine with that. I’ve always been about the revenge, and that doesn’t feel any less justified as a result of that choice. Overall though, it doesn’t mess sufficiently well to deliver the necessary impact.

Dir: Samuel Vainisi
Star: Alyss Winkler, Jason Crowe, Ember Burns, Keith Voigt Jr.

While She Was Out

  By

★★★
“Christmas shopping can be hell”

Della (Basinger) is stuck in a marriage with her abusive husband (Sheffer). But she deals with it, for the sake of their two children, whom she adores. It’s Christmas Eve, and she escapes to the mall for a little retail therapy. The lot there is packed, and she leaves a passive-aggressive note on the windscreen of a particularly selfish parker. Big mistake. For it belongs to Chuckie (Haas) and his young group of multiracial thugs (one black, one Hispanic and one Asian, so that’s nice…). The subsequent altercation leads to the death of a mall cop, with Della as the only witness. So they pursue her, first to a construction site, then into the nearby woods, intent on making sure she can’t testify against them.

It’s kinda daft, and that’s putting it mildly. Takes a bit of time to get going too, with scenes of Della mall-ratting, and suffering microaggresions like a barista spelling her name wrong. Eventually, it gets to the violence, and things pick up, even if the silliness persists. Most obviously, Della lugging a big, red tool-box with her, shown in the poster, while she runs around the forest. It is, admittedly, a tool-box necessary to the plot, not least for its part in an energetic and impressive, “tyre-iron repeatedly to the face” sequence. This is just one of the ways in which Della dispatches the gang members, although the first is more the victim of an unfortunate accident than enemy action. 

The loopiness reaches its peak at the end, when the face-off between Della and the last gang member goes in a direction you probably would not have expected. Let’s leave it at that. But overall, this is an enjoyable enough slice of nonsense, with a story which is all the better for being extremely simple. Though it is easy enough to think of ways in which it could be improved though. For example, give Della some kind of back story to explain her ability to best young men in hand-to-hand combat. The story makes mention of her classes in Pilates, Spanish and mechanics; would it be so hard to have thrown in a karate class as well?

Probably the major potential area for improvement is on the villains’ side. Haas has a somewhat creepy vibe, however it’s one better suited to a lone psycho than a gang leader. Some of the dialogue between the members is also risible, as if writer/director Montford had no experience she could use to relate to her characters. They come off as largely unthreatening, more like kids playing dress-up than actual psychos, and the relative ease with which Della can counter them doesn’t help. But Basinger is good value in her role, and I will confess to nodding in appreciation at the final scene, even if it’s something we should probably have seen coming. I was entertained adequately by this, and that’s all I wanted.

Dir: Susan Montford
Star: Kim Basinger, Lukas Haas, Leonard Wu, Craig Sheffer

Locked In

  By

★★½
“Die Hard in a storage facility? Hardly.”

I am old enough to remember when Suvari was playing jailbait in American Beauty. It is therefore a bit disturbing to find her here, taking on the role of the mother of a seventeen-year-old daughter. Where has the time gone? But then, it has now been approaching 23 years since Beauty came out. This realization is probably more chilling than anything this technically competent, but almost entirely lacklustre thriller is able to deliver. It starts off with an interesting premise, and even has some not commonly-seen elements in its heroine. But the longer this goes on, the more it feels rote and by the numbers, without enough to differentiate it from other, better entries in the (more or less) Die Hard knock-off sub-genre.

Maggie (Suvari) is a single mom, struggling to make ends meet after her husband is sent to prison. She and daughter Tarin (Polish) cross swords frequently, and Maggie is also teetering on the edge of being evicted from their apartment in an unsavoury neighbourhood. She works at a storage facility, becomes aware that her boss is up to something shady, and stumbles across a box of cash – the proceeds of his side-hustle, renting out space to store stolen goods. Tempted to take some of the money to solve her financial issues, she decides not to. But she then sees over the facility’s CCTV cameras, her boss being killed by Mel (Fahey) and Ross (Perez), who have come to retrieve a stash of diamonds, the proceeds of a robbery. Complicating matters, Tarin is also in the building.

The heroine has some interesting traits, and it’s a shame these aren’t leveraged more. For example, she’s a Christian, reading passages from the Bible to Tarin. She also falls short of being particularly competent, and is easily cowed in the face of aggression. Right at the start, it’s also established she suffers from claustrophobia; that seems like a particularly obvious plot-point, yet at least the film doesn’t overplay that hand. The film’s issues are more on the other side of the coin, with far too much camera time given to the villains of the piece. They are about the least effective thing the movie has to offer, with Fahey and Costas Mandylor getting characters straight out of stock casting.

To be honest, this is more of a thriller than an action movie. Tarin needs to outwit her enemies, and figure out who she can trust, more than taking them down, John McClane style. However, the scenario, especially with her having to defend her child (who is Annoying Teenager 1.0.1, in the same way as we get Bad Guys 1.0.1.), is what makes it qualify here. While first-time director Gutierrez tries to use the single location to amp up the tension, I can’t remember off-hand a single moment where this worked to the film’s advantage.  Then again, I can’t remember very much about it overall; considering I watched it less than 24 hours ago, that’s not a good sign…

Dir: Carlos V. Gutierrez
Star: Mena Suvari, Jasper Polish, Jeff Fahey, Manny Perez

Karate Do

  By

★★½
“Do, a dear…”

Firstly, I’m not quite sure whether this is a movie or not. The IMDb lists it with a running time of 98 minutes, but Tubi had it as 4 x 25-minute episodes. I’m guessing the former is just a compilation of the latter, it works about the same either way. The title translates as “The way of the empty hand”, and the emphasis here is very much on the first part: the journey. The heroine is Nicki Wright (G. Niebauer), who has barely got out of rehab for alcohol problems, when she gets involved in a brawl, after seeing a woman being assaulted by a man. Her mother had had enough of dealing with Nicki’s taciturn BS, and dumps her on her father, Cliff (D. Niebauer).

Turns out Cliff was a bit of a karate bad-ass, and agrees to teach his estranged daughter the martial art. However, while Nicki wants simply to learn how to beat people up, Cliff insists on the process, beginning with the simplest of forms, and teaching her as much about the philosophy of karate, as the physical movements. He also introduces her to other martial arts, such as kendo, and Nicki (inevitably) begins to realize there is considerably more to the field than pure aggression. Inspired by her father’s teachings, she seeks to pass it on to high-school girls, so they can defend themselves. Her plan does not meet with unbridled enthusiasm by the local principal, shall we say. Meanwhile, her father finds himself in desperate need of cash, after his stock investments tank.

If you’re a fan of training montages – especially with voice-overs –  boy, is this the movie for you. Normally, that would be a severe problem, but as mentioned above, this is not a film about beating people up. It’s about the spiritual transition which can be obtained through rigourous physical training. As such, it’s likely among the most accurate martial-arts films I’ve ever seen, in the sense of being true to the central ethos and overall philosophy. There’s no rival school with which to duel. No climactic tournament. The biggest battle Nicki faces is with her inner demons, in the form of her alcoholism. You have to respect the film-makers’ adherence to their core beliefs.

That said… There’s a reason why most films introduce such artificial conflicts. Because, truth be told, “real” martial arts is pretty damn dull, as a viewing experience to the casual spectator. As depicted here, it has about the entertainment quotient of watching aerobics. Matters are not helped by the way this seemed to finish after four episodes without any of the threads being satisfactorily resolved. It feels like more were needed to address the story-lines, and the result was unsatisfactory. I did enjoy the familial feel here: I’m guessing Nicki and Cliff genuinely are father and daughter, or something similar, and their relationship is convincing. However, that is not enough to overcome an underwhelming lack of dramatic structure, and unless you’re a karate student yourself, I can’t honestly recommend this.

Dir: Jessie Topsi
Star: Gabrielle Niebauer, Dan Niebauer, Paris Moletti, Heather Alexander