Author: Jim McLennan

Resilience and the Lost Gems

  By

★★
“Lost and found”

I certainly admire the aim here; there’s aren’t enough action-heroine films which are aimed at a family audience, especially with a young protagonist. We’ve had The Golden Compass, Enola Holmes and Abigail, but they are pretty rare. This is a considerably lower-budget entry than those, though make no mistake, it still certainly qualifies here. Its 11-year-old heroine, Resilience O’Neil (Finn) – known for obvious reasons as Rizzie – has no apparent fear, whizzing around the Utah desert on her mini-bike, until a flash flood separates her from her parents and younger brother. She then has to survive on her own, fending off wolves, haboobs and a pair of predatory creeps, while making her way back to civilization to get help for her family.

What’s weird is, the titular gems are all but irrelevant. In the opening twenty minutes, there’s a lot of talk about them, and their loss 150 or so years ago. But apres le deluge, they are almost entirely forgotten, and what we have instead is a straightforward wilderness survival story. To be honest, this is a considerable improvement over the thoroughly unconvincing historical re-enactments in the beginning, complete with sepia tinting and fake film scratches. The flood is staged surprisingly well, to the point I was convinced everyone concerned was sure to be dead. Finn seems to do a lot of her own stunts too, and not just on the bike. There’s a sequence of her clambering down a rockface which had me looking up the number for Child Protective Services. Decent dronework and the pleasant Utah scenery also stopped me from turning this off entirely.

For much, much worse are both the script and the performances. There’s hardly a line here which doesn’t seem forced and/or unnatural, and as noted above, the lost treasure thread is set up at painful length, before being abandoned for an hour. Then there’s the stuffed chicken carried around by one of the villains, who in addition are so incompetent as to pose no credible threat at all. I will give Kiara a pass; it’s her debut, and few actresses her age would be able adequately to put over the emotions necessary here, after the apparent loss of her family. [Natalie Portman in Leon remains the gold standard]

However, none of the adults are any better, either engaging in wild over-acting or resorting to a dull monotone when delivering their dialogue. It doesn’t help that there are issues with some of the audio, which varies wildly in quality, and is occasionally indecipherable. As a result, you’ll find yourself gritting your teeth just about every time anyone opens their mouth. This is probably the first time I’ve felt that a movie would have been better off, filmed as a throwback to the silent era – just pit Rizzie against the natural world, without chit-chat. I admit it would have been considerably more challenging as a project. Yet even if unsuccessful, I think I’d have preferred that approach.

Dir: Brian Finn
Star: Kiara Finn, Don Shanks, Adam Johnson, Gisi Hong
a.k.a. Resilience and the Last Spike

Hidden Dragon, by Trudi Jaye

  By

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

This version of the world is more or less identical to our own. Except, several hundred years ago, there was a catastrophe in which massive dragons rampaged around, with humans being collateral damage. A secret society called the Earthbound managed to end the thread, partly through the invention of the Spell Web – basically, an Internet for magic users. Now, the Earthbound and a secret government organization, the Supernatural Intelligence Group, operate to keep a largely oblivious population in the dark. Though everyone knows dragons are extinct… aren’t they?

Well, for whatever reason, someone seems very keen to take out Mei Walker, who has grown up under the protection of the SIG, before she comes into her supernatural powers at age 20, which will be in a few weeks. There have been over 530 assassination attempts made against her in the past 12 years. While the Earthbound and the SIG are supposed to be allies, it’s clear there’s a faction of the former intent on getting their hands on Mei, and using her talents for their own ends. Fortunately, she’s not exactly defenseless. Beyond those magic abilities, allowing her to manipulate the element of water, she has also been brought up to be able to take care of herself. She’s forced on the run with SIG agent Seth, unsure who she can trust – even her long-absent father – or how far up the plot against her goes.

I think my main problem is that Mei is almost entirely in the dark as to why she is so important. She (as well as, by proxy, the reader since it’s all told in the first person) and Seth seem about the only people oblivious to the specifics of her situation. It’s a conceit which seems there solely to generate a sense of mystery – not least because of her being left a mysterious box which is built up as being a serious Macguffin, but contains basically nothing of significance. It feels as if, especially after 500+ attempts on her life, the story would have made more sense for her to be aware of the situation from the beginning, rather than running around blind. By the end, we finally know what’s about to happen, though the book ends before there’s any conclusion as to exactly what that means.

Outside of that (admittedly, fairly major) flaw, this is okay. Mei is pitched at a nice level of ability: competent, without being super-powered, and there’s a lack of significant romance which is pleasant. There is a spell in the middle which edges towards the dreaded urban fantasy love-triangle, before it backs off – at least, for now… Jaye does a decent job of building a world lurking just beneath ours, with the standout scene perhaps being Mei’s retrieval of the box from a pawnbroker, who is also a collector of magical artifacts and… things. But safe to say, I think I prefer my fantasy considerably less shrouded in mystery.

Author: Trudi Jaye
Publisher: Star Media, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 4 in the Dragon Rising series.

Omega1

  By

★½
“Motion without emotion. “

It probably didn’t help that I watched this the same day as I finished off the slick, well-animated and occasionally downright beautiful Arcane. This is… not any of those. Well, that’s a bit unfair. The artwork in this “motion comic” is actually not bad (the cover, right, is certainly striking, if not exactly representative!). But being taken off the printed page diminishes the impact considerably, especially when combined with some genuinely terrible voice acting. The setting here is… let’s be honest, it’s Johnny Mnemonic, a good cyberpunk novel by William Gibson that became a not-so-good Keanu Reeves movie. In both worlds, data is now transferred in the heads of human couriers, this being deemed safer than online methods which are vulnerable to hackers. Megan is one such courier, capable of defending her cargo with extreme prejudice.

Except, it turns out there’s considerably more to her past than even she knows, as becomes clear after a client tries to assassinate her. Thereafter, things get increasingly complex, with a host of friends, enemies, enemies pretending to be friends, and a slew of Alphas, which are clones based on the DNA of Meg, a.k.a. Omega. It’s all a) rather confusing, and b) not very interesting. Though it’s a bit of a vicious cycle. b) triggers an attention deficit, which acts as a force multiplier on a), then this feeds back into b). I actually did give up about two-thirds of the way through. But much like Battered, the short running time (53 mins here) was its saving grace. Realizing there were barely 15 mins left, I put it back on. Though I will not be taking questions on plot developments in that final section. 

The structure here is also off-putting, with the story separated into episodes, no longer than five minutes, which interrupts the flow in an annoying and pointless fashion. Just tell the damn story. But my biggest gripe was the voices, though Andrei as Omega isn’t the problem. It’s a supporting cast who could, almost universally, be replaced by a speech-to-text program, with positive results. And that’s not even mentioning the bad, fake foreign accents, e.g. Russian (or maybe it was French. Hard to tell) and Spanish. Considering there’s not even lip-synching to consider, in this unanimated format, it’s a poor effort indeed.

Maybe it’s just me. Perhaps I need to watch one of these every few years, to be reminded of how crappy the motion comic concept is. For on the basis of this, it seems to combine the worst elements of both comic books and animation. However, it may not be fair to judge the whole medium, on the basis of what seems a badly executed example. There were a couple of moments where the conversion process was reasonabe, and the effect of the comic panels came through as adequately realized. But overall, this was a poor excuse for entertainment. The “To be continued” caption at the end, seemed more like a threat than a promise. 

Dir: Mark Edward Lewis
Star (voice): Alina Andrei, Mark Edward Lewis, Jan Shiva, Teresa Noreen

The Girl and the Gun

  By

★★★
“The equalizer”

The protagonist is a young woman (Gutierrez), who works in a department store in Quezon City, the largest city in the Philippines. Her life is one of constant drudgery, with what income not spent on her tiny, shared apartment, being sent home to her mother in the countryside. She can’t afford to buy new stockings to replace her torn ones – a fact which brings her into conflict with her manager – or even go out with colleagues for drinks after work. She has a lecherous landlord, and is treated by everyone as the perpetual doormat she is.

Then she finds a gun.

She initially does nothing with the weapon, discarded in the alley by her apartment building. But after being sexually assaulted, she picks it up, and everything changes – it gives her a voice, both literally and psychologically. The key trigger (pun intentionally) is using it to rescue her flat-mate from being assaulted by her boyfriend. She then suddenly realizes she doesn’t need to take it anymore: whether “it” is her boss harassing her about the stockings, or simply a shop worker being rude to her. Having the weapon gives her the confidence to stand up for herself, a surprisingly radical concept. Perhaps a variant of “An armed society is a polite society,” as Robert A. Heinlein once said.

Then she offers to help her flat-mate handle the abusive boyfriend permanently… But will she take the final step and go through with it? Hold that thought though, because the film then takes a left turn, diverting to tell the story of the weapon, and how it ended up in the alley. This is, unfortunately, a misstep in cinematic terms, with a segment which does not travel anywhere nearly as well as the first half. It’s a rather impenetrable story of death squads, corrupt cops, drug dealers and familes, which I can only presume, reflects life in the underbelly of urban life in the Philippines. It seemed, to me, like a pointless diversion that didn’t say much of interest about anything, and when the film eventually returns to the “girl” part of the equation, any forward momentum had been lost.

That’s a pity, as there were points when it seemed like an Asian take on Ms. 45, with its heroine almost mute until the point at which she powers up with a fire-arm. This heroine is considerably more sympathetic, in part because she shows considerably more restraint. While she fantasizes about killing her rapist, for example. she doesn’t actually pull the trigger on him. However, as well as the unwanted diversion into the history of her weapon, the ending is less polished. It’s one of those open ones, where the audience has to decide what happens. These tend to feel like a cop-out, as if the writer couldn’t come up with a proper way to finish the film. Still, the first fifty minutes do enough, to make this worth a watch.

Dir: Rae Red
Star: Janine Gutierrez, Felix Roco, JC Santos, Elijah Canlas
a.k.a. Babae at baril

Goodbye Honey

  By

★½
“Trucking terribly written.”

There is a good concept here. Unfortunately, rarely have I seen an idea so conspicuously derailed by dreadful execution. Let’s not get ahead of ourselves though, and begin by focusing on the positives here. Dawn (Morgan) is a truck driver who is on a cross-country route, and pulls off the road into a remote, wooded location for an obligatory rest stop. Barely has she come to a halt, when a terrified young woman, Phoebe (Gobin), shows up outside her cab, demanding help. She claims to have been abducted, and been held nearby. But she managed to escape from her kidnapper, who is now hot on her heels, with evil intentions. However, is the new arrival speaking the truth or is she dangerously deranged?

It’s safe to say, you have my attention with this set-up, and Morgan is nicely unarchetypal as an action heroine, both in her middle-age, and a world-worn appearance which is about as unglamourous as you could imagine. She’s likely the best thing about this, and her performance was good enough to stop the whole thing from imploding entirely. This matters, because the script appears almost intentionally crafted to wreck any suspense or interest, resulting from both the premise or the lead performance. Within a few minutes of Phoebe’s arrival, Dawn has lost the keys to the truck and had her phone broken. Given the character is intended to be a highly competent, no-nonsense sort, this just doesn’t work. 

There are then two major mis-steps in terms of story-telling. A pair of stoner dudes show up, and the film grinds to a halt as Dawn has to deal with them. It’s painfully obvious they have nothing at all to do with Phoebe’s situation, and it’s embarrassing how shallow the writing for them is. Then, after they have mercifully departed the film, we get a lengthy, entirely superfluous flashback, telling us in detail how Phoebe was abducted, and what life was like in the cellar where she was kept for months. Guess what? We don’t care. It doesn’t matter, and adds nothing at all to the situation at hand. The final straw is the revelation of a connection between Dawn and the kidnapper, Cass (Kelly), which completely defies belief. I may have snorted derisively.

Inevitably it leads to him showing up and a confrontation between him and Dawn, where we learn the truth about Phoebe’s claims. Guess what v2.0? By this point, I didn’t care about then either. The film was on the screen, and I was looking in its general direction. But it would be a stretch to say I was paying any kind of attention, There is something to be said for a low-budget film cautiously writing its story within the limitation of what can be afforded: here, that’s a truck and a forest. However, the failure to convert that into anything meaningful or interesting thereafter, must also be laid at the door of the writers. 

Dir: Max Strand
Star: Pamela Jayne Morgan, Juliette Alice Gobin, Paul C. Kelly, Peyton Michelle Edwards

The Assault

  By

★★★★
“Assault on Shelter 13”

This was a very pleasant surprise. I wasn’t expecting much from this, especially after seeing Wynorski’s name – let’s be honest, he is best known for bargain basement soft-port. That said, he does occasionally hit one out of the park, such as the sublime Deathstalker II. This is definitely one of his better entries, even if it is, by and large, a low-budget version of Assault on Precinct 13.

Lisa Wilks (Ryan) witnesses the murder of her boyfriend by mob boss Blade, but is too scared to testify. Stacie (Randall), a detective on the force. is told to take care of her, and when Lisa says she’s too scared to go home, takes her to an isolated women’s shelter run by Stacie’s sister, Cindy (Dobro). However, Blade is intent on making sure Lisa doesn’t change her mind and sends his minions to storm the shelter and terminate the threat. However, he reckons without the pluck and resilience of the residents, bolstered by Stacie, as well as ex-army maintenance man, Mike (McCoy).

This has its share of questionable moments. The firing of a good twenty bullets from a hand-gun without reloading would be one, and then’s there’s the supposed two-minute countdown to the climactic explosion, which takes closer to six minutes to happen [I know, because I rewound and timed it]. But there’s a breezy energy which I found highly enjoyable, and the characters, if briefly sketched, are effectively drawn. For example, Toni (co-writer Melissa Brasselle) plays a Latina with a grudge against Stacie, for putting her boyfriend in jail. Or there’s Sandahl Bergman from Conan the Barbarian, as a paranoid schizophrenic, convinced the government is out to get her.

These are simple traits, yet prove entirely usable for plot purposes. We don’t need or want much more than this – it’d only get in the way of the action. There’s certainly no shortage of that, with wave upon wave of faceless minions storming the house, as the inhabitants try to board it up and repel any who make it through their barricades. At points, it feels almost like Night of the Living Debbies, with the thugs playing the role of the zombies. This being a Wynorski movie, there is the contractually obligated strip-club scene. However, showing unexpected restraint to keep its PG-13 certificate, the employees go no further than their undies, and are even strippers necessary to the plot, as that’s where we first meet Stacie, working undercover to expose a protection scam.

You do have to take as read the casual approach for the authorities, the first hour spent dispatching a apparently procession of cop cars into the area, who then either fail to notice anything, or vanish off the grid – because they’ve been mown down. Blade’s tactics, too, seem a bit questionable, especially considering how out-gunned the women are. But as a PG-13 actioner, I found this thoroughly entertaining, moving relentlessly forward, and making the very most of its limited resources.

Dir: Jim Wynorski
Star: Stacie Randall, Matt McCoy, Carrie Dobro, Leslie Ryan

Okay Madam

  By

★★★
“Okay enough to work”

This probably falls into the category of lightly amusing, rather than anything more. But I can’t say I was ever bored, and it’s assembled well enough technically that I can’t complain. The heroine is Mi-Young (Uhm), a former North Korean agent, who defected, changed her looks through plastic surgery, and now lives a quiet existence, with a part-time job selling pastries in the local market. She’s married to Seok-Hwan (Park), a computer repairman, and their life is frugal as far as wealth goes. Seok-Hwan, however, is wins a promotion run by a soft-drink company, getting them and their young daughter a trip to Hawaii.

It turns out the North Koreans still have an interest in ‘Magnolia’, as Mi-Young was formerly known, and need her (specifically, her iris) to unlock some nuclear protocols. They learn she will be on the plane to Honolulu, yet are just not sure which passenger she is. So they hatch a plan for former partner Cheol-Seung (Lee) to hijack the craft, identify and abduct Magnolia, and parachute out, blowing up the aircraft in their wake. Mi-Young is fortunate enough to be in the bathroom when things kick off, so is able to avoid immediate detection. On the other hand, she’s now separated from her husband and child. Both she and Seok-Kwan will need to rely on their skills – long-dormant in the case of Magnolia – to defeat the hijacks before they can execute their explosive intentions.

This one initially slid past me entirely; looking at the poster, it’s very easy to overlook the gun held by the heroine. And, to be honest, this is as much a comedy as hard-hitting action. In that mix, it’s a bit reminiscent of My Wife is Gangster [damn, that came out 20 years ago?], with a reliance on culture clashes or inappropriate actions and speech for its humour. However, it did work pretty well, helped by a good number of interesting side characters. For example, there’s a paranoid air steward who wants to be a hero; an irritable congressman; and an actress who is initially suspected of being Magnolia, due in part to her action movie filmography. Though some of the cultural stuff definitely flew above my head, a decent amount is sufficiently global to work.

The cramped surroundings of the aircraft – even if Business Class is like the African savanna in comparison to the economy spaces we occupy – make a interesting setting for hand-to-hand combat, and help excuse the lack of guns. We’ve seen former singer Uhm before here, starring in Princess Aurora, and she acquits herself well in this. While I suspect some doubling for the more athletic moments, it’s done competently enough to pass muster. I would prefer to have seen more action, in fact, and a little less of the dramatic elements, though that’s more likely my problem than that of the intended audience. I will likely never watch it again, yet don’t feel it was a waste of 100 mins.

Dir: Cheol-ha Lee
Star: Uhm Jung-Hwa, Park Sung-Woong, Lee Sang-Yoon, Bae Jeong-Nam 

Black Crab

  By

★★★
“Let slip the slogs of war…”

Rapace seems to be turning into a female version of Ryan Reynolds. By which I mean, it seems that hardly a month goes past without a new Netflix Original coming out starring her. Ryan had 6 Underground, Red Notice and The Adam Project. Noomi has given us What Happened to Monday, The Trip and, now, this. Still, much as with Reynolds, I’m happy to see her working regularly, and while the results may be a bit variable, they’re usually worth a look. This is no different, though I’m not sure whether its story, driven by a (largely generic) war in the Eastern half of Europe, is helped or hurt by its timing. On the one hand, it gives this a certain “ripped from the headlines” topicality. On the other, I largely watch movies to escape everyday life, not have my nose rubbed in it.

Rapace plays Caroline Edh, who was split up from her daughter in the war’s early stages and has never been able to find her in the years since, as the conflict has turned her homeland into a meat-grinder. Now a soldier, she gets talked into a perilous mission that could turn the tide of the war, with the promise that her child is on the far end of it. She’ll be part of a group of six, skating across a treacherous frozen archipelago in enemy territory, to deliver a package – with the usual, stern “Don’t dare open it” warnings – to a research facility.

I do wonder why they sent a group: it’s not as if the package is large. One person, the quickest skater going undercover, could potentially slide beneath the radar, when a platoon of soldiers attracts more attention. I suspect it’s simply so the various perils, of thin ice, enemy combatants and unfriendly locals, can thin the herd of the operation. Some of them are so thinly-drawn, the makers might as well have slapped a red shirt on them, and been done with it. However, it’s still an impressively filmed, brutal slog of a journey, across a hellish landscape, which will have you reaching for a warm blanket and cup of cocoa. This likely reaches its peak when the group stumble into an ice graveyard: it’s quite the imagery.

We are, of course, here for Rapace, who learned to skate and broke her nose during filming. Despite one of the ugliest hair-styles in her filmography, her performance, along with the visuals, keep things adequately interesting, when the plot and supporting characters often fail to do so. In particular, the last half-hour (though it runs 114 minutes, so there’s quite a lot before that point) is almost entirely predictable, with the big twist actually weakening the lead character, by making Edh seem too gullible for her own good. Consequently, the subsequent redemption feels a bit too much of an uphill struggle. And even a novice like me knows that skating uphill is a tough ask…

Dir: Adam Berg
Star: Noomi Rapace, Jakob Oftebro, Dar Salim, Ardalan Esmaili

Confessions of a Homicidal Prostitute: Demonatrix

  By

★½
“Nice title. Shame about the film.”

I must confess I have not seen Confessions of a Homicidal Prostitute, to which this is a sequel. It’s marginally possible, I suppose, that the character development, story and nuance were present there, and explain why these are all but entirely absent in its successor. I would not, however, be prepared to bet on it. I suspect the original was every bit as mean-spirited as this: and “suspect” is all I’ll ever do, because I won’t be making any effort to track it down. In fact, I probably wouldn’t watch it if my aged mother begged me to on her death-bed. Too harsh? Perhaps. Yet I don’t think I’ve ever seen a flat-out uglier film, in terms of largely repellent people being extremely unpleasant to one another, shot in a way that exacerbates its grimness. In its defence, that may be the point. Again: may. It could also just be torture porn of the lowest-rent kind.

From what I can gather, Lilith (Baun) is the titular hooker; I’m not sure if the weird contact lens she wears in one eye is a tribute to Christina Lindberg and her eye-patch in Thriller: A Cruel Picture? Anyway, she apparently got pushed over the mental edge by abuse, and responded to violence with violence. Here, she introduces gal pal and fellow prostitute Eve (Shenk) to the lair where Lilith carries out her torture and slaying. Eve is remarkably blasé about the whole, potential “accessory after the fact” thing, and politely declines to get involved, saying “I don’t think I could stomach it… Not for me!” This reluctance lasts about 30 minutes into the film, where she gets brutalized by the vicious Jackson (McGinnis). All of a sudden, she’s rather more gung-ho, a tendency encouraged by Lilith (“The empowerment you feel after you kill this bastard, will be indescribable”). After initially both being caught and tortured by Jackson, the pair are able to turn the tables on their captor, taking their revenge and sodomizing him with a metal pole.

They then begin a two-woman killing spree, washing the scum off the streets. There’s a montage sequence here, which is quite effective, and rescues the film from receiving the dreaded one-star rating. But otherwise, we’re dealing with content which is cheap and poorly-executed, and possesses little or no emotional impact at all. Weirdly, given the topic and grindhouse-oriented title, the only nudity present is extremely fake penises being abused. Otherwise, it’s remarkably chaste. Though, to be honest, I’m fine with the lead actresses keeping their clothes on. No worries there. I’m good. With special effects that are largely unconvincing, this doesn’t even work as a gore flick, and there’s no sense of development of plot or characters. I got to the end with no sense of.. well, anything. I was neither entertained, educated or appalled. Overall, it’s the kind of film where I wonder if I’ve spent more time writing this review, than was actually spent making the movie.

Dir: Emir Skalonja
Star: Casey Baun, Krystal Shenk, Paul McGinnis, Richard Ruiz

Banshee

  By

★★
“Blows a cylinder”

This one is slightly unusual among action-heroine films, in that it was both written and directed by women: Kirsten Elms and Kari Skogland respectively. Unfortunately, it’s not exactly an advert for their gender; after a brisk start, it falls apart, and becomes a ridiculously implausible movie, in a completely different genre from where it started. That’s a real pity, because where it started, had a lot more potential than where it ends up. It begins with Sage Rion (Manning), a young but highly-talented thief, taking a bet with her partner, as to who can boost a classic car quickest. She picks a 1966 Dodge Challenger, but inadvertently leaves her ID at the scene of the crime.

Back at her house, she finds a note telling Sage to return the car, or the owner will kill her partner, whom he has kidnapped. She does, even though this puts her in deep water with her employer, for having taken and returned the Dodge in defiance of his orders. And this is where the script goes, not just off the road, but through the crash-barrier and down an embankment into a ravine. For Sage is the recipient of a severed head, and gets framed for the murder of her partner. This forces her on the run, taking shelter in the apartment of hooker friend Brenna (Williams) as the police hunt her. However, rookie cop Fitz (Lombardi) thinks there may be more to it than that. Sage hunts down the owner of the Dodge herself, discovering in the end he is a mad DJ serial killer, who kidnaps and tortures his female victims for the sounds they make, which he incorporates into his mixes.

You may want to read that sentence again. Slowly.

What, pray tell, was wrong with the fresh idea of a young, cocky girl car thief, that it was deemed necessary to apply all this sub-Se7en nonsense to it? It was doing perfectly fine as is. She’d been established as a solid character, with some endearing quirks – for instance, she won’t sleep with any man, unless he first volunteers to cook for her. It would have been interesting enough, to see how she’d handle dealing with her irritable and prone to violence boss. Instead, that angle gets all but discarded when the movie moves on to the “lunatic disk-jockey”. It briefly re-appears, only to be ended in a largely ridiculous method of closure.

The other elements of the film are banal and by the book. You have Fitz and his grizzled partner, who suspects the worst of Sage, for no particular reason (I mean, they could easily figure out the head was severed elsewhere?). And the serial killer is little more than a walking set of cliches, who kidnaps Brenna in order to get to Sage, because… Oh, I dunno. I’d largely lost the will to live by that point in proceedings. So much potential here, only for it to be so completely wasted.

Dir: Kari Skogland
Star: Taryn Manning, Romano Orzari, Michael Lombardi, Genelle Williams