The Russian Bride

★★★
“Gothic Grand Guignol”

For the first, perhaps, three-quarters, this feels almost more like a Lifetime Original Movie. Then, at the end… Hoo-boy. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, shall we? It begins with Nina (Orlan), seeking to escape a fraught life in Russia, for her and her young daughter, Dasha (Pimenova). Through an online dating service, she meets Karl Frederick (Bernsen), and they eventually move to America to be with him. While he’s an older gentleman, initially they seem to have struck it lucky, for he’s a rich, retired surgeon, who owns a massive estate in the country. In fact, you could say it seems almost too good to be true…

Which, of course, it is, despite the rapid marriage which follows. Even if you’re not aware of Bernsen’s long, distinguished career of playing psychos of various flavours (going back at least to The Dentist in 1996), the warning signs quickly pile up. The antagonistic housekeeper. Karl’s coke habit. The forbidden wing of the house. Apparently spooky occurrences. The random attack dog. A precarious, highly-pointy chandelier hanging in the hallway. The previous wife and child Karl “forgot” to mention. Though these all pale in comparison to the sight of Bernsen’s buttocks, and are before we get to his attempt outright to dispose of Nina in a riding accident. It’s clear he is rather more interested in Dasha than her mother. The only questions remaining are, to what purpose, and what is Nina going to do about it, to protect her daughter and herself.

The latter question is of particular relevance here, and is best answered by the picture on the right, depicting Nina in a blood-drenched wedding gown. To call the final act of this berserk would be an understatement. Shotgun blasts to the head and hands. Multiple hammers to the head. And, of course, the much anticipated attack of the highly-pointy chandelier. It’s as if the Lifetime channel production was hijacked by Rob Zombie and Eli Roth for the final week. And possible the maddest element of all? It’s triggered after the heroine falls face-first into Karl’s stash of Colombian marching powder, in echoes of the peyote-driven rampage we enjoyed in Revenge.

Ojeda is no stranger to this site, having previously given us Savaged. If you’ve seen it, then the latter part of the film makes considerably more sense – if anything, it’s the earlier going which is more out of character to that. However, it’s also the biggest weakness; as detailed above, the script is seriously guilty of overloading the film with Ominous Goings-On [capitals used deliberately], to the point any half-responsible mother would be “Peace, out”, and taking her child on the first plane back to Russia. There are times when less is more, and the first three-quarters of the film demonstrate this. However, there are also times when more is more. And, boy, the last quarter are an example of that, just as much.

Dir: Michael S. Ojeda
Star: Oksana Orlan, Corbin Bernsen, Kristina Pimenova, Lisa Goodman

Ride Like a Girl

★★½
“Trots, when it should gallop”

This opens and closes with footage and photographs of the real Michelle Payne, who is the subject of the film. Part of me wonders if that documentary approach might have proved a more successful one, rather than the parade of sports drama cliches we get here. Admittedly, quite a lot of them are based in fact. Payne was the first woman to ride to victory in the Melbourne Cup – that’s Australia’s premier horse-race, roughly equivalent in prestige to the Kentucky Derby or Grand National in the US or UK respectively. This alone, is quite an achievement. But she did so as one of ten brothers and sisters, who largely had to bring themselves up after their mother died when Michelle was only six months old. Her father was a horse trainer, and no fewer than eight of his offspring became jockeys, including Michelle of course.

In this version, Palmer plays the heroine, with Neill the ever-tolerant father attempting to steer her career. It’s not easy, with Michelle having to deal with a racing establishment that still doubts women can be as good jockeys as men, before eventually convincing owner Darren Weir (Stapleton) to give her a chance. She also has to come back from an fall that left her with a fractured skull and bruised brain. Then, she almost lost the opportunity to ride her horse, Prince of Penzance, in the big race after being suspended for racing tactics perceived as dangerous, fairly or not. In other words: basically checking off all the obvious impediments, and the film adds little or nothing of note to them, though some of the racing footage is effective enough. [The film, probably wisely, glosses over post-Cup events. Prince of Penzance went lame and had to retire; Weir was charged with cruelty to animals; and Payne got another suspension for amphetamine abuse. Oops]

It works better when it’s remaining grounded, in a way only Australians can be. Neill does a good job of that as the long-suffering father, and it’s a shame he all but vanishes from the second half of proceedings. It does offer amusing moments like watching a posse of nuns (or whatever the collective term is for them!), marching into a bookmakers on Melbourne Cup Day to bet on Payne and her pony. Much credit is also due to the film-makers for letting Payne’s real-life brother, Stevie, who has Down’s Syndrome, play himself in the movie. But it does suffer from what is likely an inevitable problem given the source material: we know how it’s going to end, and how it’s going to get there as well. Given this, taking a few more risks with the approach or the portrayals of the characters might have been warranted. Instead, Griffiths seems intent on taking the safest route she can find between plot-points which are largely obvious. The results are, as you’d expect, little more than feel-good fodder.

Dir: Rachel Griffiths
Star: Teresa Palmer, Sam Neill, Sullivan Stapleton, Stevie Payne

Cry for the Bad Man

★★½
“Play Freebird!!!

Despite a very brief running time of only 70 minutes, this still manages to seem talky and overlong. That’s a shame, as it manages to waste a good performance from a genre veteran, playing an action heroine who is not your typical one. The former is Camille Keaton, who is having a bit of a B-movie renaissance in her career, forty years after starring in the notorious rape-revenge film, I Spit on Your Grave. And the latter? Well, Keaton is now in her seventies, but based on this, is still capable of wielding a mean shotgun. And clearly, of taking no shit from anyone. Indeed, you could almost read this as the sundown years of her Grave character, Jennifer Hills.

Though here, she is Marsha Kane, a widow who is faced with fending off predatory offers on her property from local ne’er do wells, the MacMohan boys: Wayne (Peeler), Derrek (Dooley) and Billy, operating on behalf of the family patriarch, Bill. He wants Marsha’s house, and is going to let a little thing like her complete disinterest in selling stand in the way. So he sends his kin to make not-so-subtle hints, knowing the local police are in the family’s pocket. When the threats don’t work either, the boys return at midnight for a more physical approach, only to discover quickly that Kane is more than able to fend for herself. However, her daughter (Konzen) shows up, offering the MacMohan’s potentially useful leverage against her mother.

The title seems to be taken from a Lynyrd Skynyrd song, about the firing of their manager, so I’m not sure of the relevance here. But what could, and probably should be a small-scale version of Assault on Precinct 13, fails to achieve anything like the necessary degree of tension. It instead, collapses in on itself, as the script prefers to concentrate on largely uninteresting chit-chat and extremely slow creeping down poorly-lit corridors. That’s when it isn’t blundering into plot-holes. For example, when the MacMohan brothers arrive for their midnite escapade, they’re greeted with gunfire, injuring one. The smart thing to do would be to back off, call their pals at the police station, and have Mrs. Kane hauled off to prison for attempted murder. Property secured! Meanwhile, on her side, why stop with one? They are literally standing in front of the door, arguing about what to do.

This wastes Keaton, who has a quiet strength about her, as well as hints of a past that were less than squeaky-clean. Though, again – who keeps a copy of their police mug-shot in a box of souvenirs? It also goes to show that action heroines come in more shapes and sizes – and ages – than Hollywood would perhaps recognize. Even when they had Helen Mirren in Red, she was still undeniably glamourous. That isn’t the case here, and it’s all the more refreshing for it. Just a shame it wasn’t put to the use of a considerably better storyline.

Dir: Sam Farmer
Star: Camille Keaton, Scott Peeler, Karen Konzen, Eric Dooley

Bit

★★★½
“The Lost Girls”

There are times when I am bracing myself, going into a movie. Here’s the synopsis for this one: “A transgender teenage girl on summer vacation in Los Angeles fights to survive after she falls in with four queer feminist vampires, who try to rid the city’s streets of predatory men.” Given my long-standing aversion to message movies, this seemed like 90 minutes of my worst nightmare. What had I let myself in for? But this proved to be surprisingly accessible – even for those of us who are neither transgender nor queer, and are enrolled in the Camille Paglia school of feminism.

It reminded me of We Are The Night, about a similar group of female “party vampires” who embrace a newcomer to their ranks. Though as the tagline above suggests, I guess both movies owe a large debt to The Lost Boys. To be honest, if I hadn’t read the synopsis, I wouldn’t know the heroine, Laurel (Maines) is intended to be transgender. There is discussion of some previous trauma before she leaves home after graduating, but it’s never her defining characteristic. Her new pals are relentlessly feminist, to the point of misanthropic. According to their leader, Duke (Hopper), the prime directive is: “You never, ever turn a man. Men can’t handle power. They have it already, and look what they’ve done with it.”  Yet her own handling of power is highly questionable: she admits to using it for “indiscriminate” killing, and compares their group to terrorists. By the end, Laurel is openly challenging that unbreakable rule – as she should.

Their two performance are the glue which holds this together, in particular as it depicts the slowly developing conflict between Laurel and Duke. The script also plays a part, revealing the truth about Duke’s origins and powers – and the more we learn, the more questionable the leader becomes. Yet there are also moments of dry humour, which stop this from becoming a grim fairy tale. For instance, Duke telling Laurel, “The first rule of Bite Club…” When this triggers little more than a derisive snort from the new recruit, one of her lieutenants pipes up, dead-panning, “Juggalos was taken.” This kind of thing fits in: I suspect in such a scenario, the vampires would not take themselves entirely seriously.

The flaws tend to be when the film does occasionally topple over into self-importance. The worst offender is probably Vlad, the master of their species. While the film opens with some snarky comments about Twilight, his performance is far more hammy than anything delivered in that franchise. There’s a badly underdeveloped plot about vampire-hunters, which is little more than “Boys are stupid”. I could also have done without a soundtrack which appears to be the writer-director’s iPhone on random, or the gratuitous Death Valley Girls concert [I can only presume they’re pals of his, given some free publicity in the movie]. All told though, this was considerably better than my prejudices would have had me believe going in. The lesson here appears to be, don’t judge a film by its synopsis.

Dir: Brad Michael Elmore
Star: Nicole Maines, Diana Hopper, Zolee Griggs, James Paxton

Girls, Guns and Blood

★½
“It’s trying. So very trying…”

Maybe I’m getting too old for this kind of thing. Perhaps there was a time in my callow youth when I would have been grateful for the light-to-moderate amount of gratuitous nudity which this contains. Now, though? Its flaws overwhelm any such merits. Or maybe it was the fact that I watched this while dozed up to the eyeballs on DayQuil, and frankly, coughing up phlegm proved to be a more satisfactory pursuit.

It takes place in a supposed “brothel” run by Monique (Love). Quotes used advisedly, since it looks considerably more like someone’s house. A party of high-rollers are scheduled to be coming in, dropping thousands of dollars: though quite why they want to, escapes me, since the staff here are no more than “somewhat attractive.” You could probably catch better fish with a bottle of Jager in your average night-club on a Friday evening. Anyway, doubts about this aside, it turns out this “party” is actually a robbery, who loot the place after abusing the women. 

Needless to say, they’re not standing for that, so Kitty (Nguyen), Trix (Amber), Beretta (Valentien) and the rest of the girls ride out in hot pursuit, intent on recovering the ill-gotten gains and punishing the perpetrators. Fortunately, the gang have gone their separate ways, which makes it easier for the women to take them down: the old “Let’s split up!” mistake. But perhaps things aren’t quite as cut and dried as they appear. Maybe there’s a snake in the grass, who is quite happy to let her fellow hookers thin out the herd on her behalf, because the fewer slices of the pie there end up being, the better it will be for the survivors.

It’s all tiresomely amateur. Not least, the feeble attempts at comic relief, such as the gangster kingpin, Kaiser, whose droning complaints about lost money to a ski-mask clad ninja, go on way past what could remotely be considered entertaining. The repeated us of Six Million Dollar Man sound effects also should also have been strangled at birth. The pacing in general is awful, and the lead performances generally reflect the fact that most of the actresses are better known for adult work than their Broadway resumes. Nguyen and Love are, at least relatively credible, capable of walking and delivering lines at the same time. Some of the others? Not so much. Let’s leave it at that.

There were a couple of moments in the action which did actually work. Though I’m not sure how much sense they could be said to make, e.g. one of the women suddenly pulling a flaming sword out of… well, I’m not even going to hazard a guess at that. But when you’re left yearning for the understated subtleties of an Andy Sidaris film, there’s clearly something wrong. It might have succeeded better with alcohol, but that would likely not have combined well with my medications. Not a risk I was prepared to take, at least.

Dir: Thegin German + Robert Rowland
Star: Christine Nguyen, Britney Amber, Kleio Valentien, Rebecca Love

Soeurs D’Armes

★★½
“Army dreamers.”

This suffers from being almost exactly the same story as the previous feature we reviewed about women Kurdish fighters going up against ISIS, Les Filles Du Soleil. Both focus on a woman who is kidnapped by ISIS after they sweep through her town, and gets sold into slavery by her captors. She escapes, and joins of the all-female units who are battling the jihadist occupation. Bur there is a family member – in Filles, the heroine’s son; here, her younger brother – who is still with ISIS and has become a child soldier for them. Even if you haven’t seen the earlier film, you’ll not be surprised to hear this plays a key role in the film’s climax. The similarities are so startling, I kept expecting to hear this was a remake. It just appears to be a carbon-copy.

There are some differences, the most notable feature being the multinational nature of the women’s group here. As well as local Yezidi Zara (Gwyn), there are two young Frenchwomen, Kenza (Garrel) and Yaël (Jordana), an American sniper (Nanna Blondell, who was in Black Widow), etc. The ISIS are similar: the chief “bad guy” is English, with a strong Northern accent – though I’ve been unable to take English jihadists seriously, ever since watching Four Lions. It’s no easy task for the women’s commander (Casar) to mesh all these different upbringings, experiences and personalities into a cohesive unit.

And extending the similarity to Filles, the film has the same main weakness, and ends up spreading itself too thinly across the multiple stories it wants to tell. None of them manage to acquire the necessary depth, and most of which are more or less obvious. Not helping, the film has an unfortunate tendency to sink into drippy feminism. The montage sequence of the women training, accompanied by a pseudo-empowering “I am woman, hear me roar”-type song, marked a particular low point. More successful in general is the technically impressive action. The film’s best sequence depicts a battle between the women and a platoon of ISIS troops who are chasing a group of fleeing refugees, which includes Zara. It’s beautifully shot and well-staged, with a genuine sense of tension.

Yet, there are other, almost embarrassingly naive moments, such as the women entering a town their side has just bombed, and standing in the middle of the street for a chat, without checking the area has been cleared. I’m not a soldier, but even I know that’s… not wise. Such gaffes aside, it’s mainly the hackneyed and trite storyline that stops this from achieving any real degree of success. There is certainly a fascinating story to be told in the Kurdish women’s battalions and their part in the war against ISIS.  But that’s now two efforts which appear to have barely scratched the surface, or gone beyond the obvious. Particularly here, they seem more interested in political, religious and gender-based point-scoring than telling a good story.

Dir: Caroline Fourest
Star: Dilan Gwyn, Amira Casar, Camélia Jordana, Esther Garrel

Ravage

★★½
“Harper’s bizarre.”

Wildlife photographer Harper Sykes (Dexter-Jones) is out in the wilderness of the “Watchatoomy Valley” [fictitious, but apparently located somewhere in the Virginias], when she stumbles across a group of men brutally attacking a victim. She snaps a few pics before fleeing the scene, but her attempts to report the incident to the authorities backfire immediately, and she quickly finds herself at the mercy of their leader, the appropriately-named Ravener (Longstreet). He explains the victim was a scout for big business, whose predations would destroy the natural environment, and so had to be stopped. Now, Harper is next in line. However, she is not the innocent and helpless victim they think. Even when she has the chance to escape, Harper decides to stay in the valley, and take vengeance on Ravener and the rest of his clan.

It is an interesting idea. Frequently in the horror genre, the character arc is of the “final girl”, who only resorts to violence when finally pushed too far. That certainly isn’t the case here: indeed, Harper actually fires first, gunning down one of Ravener’s henchmen as soon as she steps from her truck. Yet there’s a reason the trope of the final girl exists, because it pulls the audience along with her. Here, Harper’s actions are unexpected enough they could well disengage much of the audience, coming as they do before we’ve established much sympathy for her. Another problem is her decision to stay and actively look for her revenge isn’t well-enough defined: I was left wondering for quite some time, why she didn’t leave. Some explanation of why she’s so skilled might have been nice: not much, just a quick reference to time in the military, or a survivalist Dad, would have been fine.

The structure is also a tad problematic, with the film being told in flashback, a heavily-bandaged Harper recounting her story to a disbelieving state trooper from her hospital bed. So, we know she will survive, and the early explanations also remove much other tension from subsequent proceedings. If you’ve seen more than, roughly, two of this kind of movie, you’ll also fail to be surprised that the kindly individual to whom the heroine turns for help, ends up being anything but. I could perhaps have done without the lengthy digression into medieval torture techniques and bovine anatomy. Though both do prove at least tangentially necessary to the plot, and the latter in particular, leads to a grisly payoff.

Dexter-Jones does a good job of selling her role, and Harper generally has no compunction about acting, e.g. blowing one of her target’s brains out at point-blank range. Yet, this is at odds with some of her other actions. She literally throws up after watching the initial savagery, and the sight of a dead body later makes her shriek like a little girl. It’s all maddeningly inconsistent, and left me rather annoyed, with too much the potential here wasted through sloppy execution.

Dir: Teddy Grennan
Star: Annabelle Dexter-Jones, Robert Longstreet, Michael Weaver, Bruce Dern
a.k.a. Swing Low

The Huntress: Rune of the Dead

★★
“Can’t see the wood for the trees. SO. Many. Trees…”

In 9th-century Scandinavia, teenage girl Runa (Stefansdotter) lives deep in the woods, with her mother, Magnhild (Idah), blind grandfather Ragnvald (Beck) and younger sister Bothild (Lyngbrant). Father Joar is notable by his absence, having gone off on a Viking raid to seek fortune for the family, and is now well overdue. However, he did at least train Runa to be a markswoman with the bow. Problems start when she finds a wounded warrior, Torulf, lying in the forest, and brings him back to their cabin, much against Magnhild’s wishes.

Torulf turns out to be a colleague of Joar’s, who tells a tale of the raiders looting a burial site – only to find vengeance coming out of the grave after them. He and Joar are the only two survivors. And when Joar returns shortly afterward, his arrival puts the whole group in peril, because of what’s inexorably following him. It’s only really at this point – two-thirds of the way in – that the film remotely begins to entertain. Up until this point, there has been a lot of sitting around the woods, and the director appears never to have heard of the maxim “Show, don’t tell.” Witness Torulf’s lengthy and frankly, boring, description of the situation, which would fit better into a Nordic saga recital than any cinematic retelling.

If the makers had gone for a siege type of film from the beginning, with the family barricaded in their cabin, and trying to fend off an unstoppable horde of barrow wights, this might have worked. It’s what I was expecting going in, and what I was waiting to see. And waiting. And waiting, while slow-moving coming of age family drama unfolded instead. I actually liked Stefansdotter in the lead role. Indeed, most of the performances are solid enough, and the same goes for the technical aspects. There was clearly some effort put in – the score, for example, is nicely done – and the forest provides a lushly appropriate backdrop against which any number of entertaining things might have unfolded. In a different, more interesting movie, anyway.

We finally do get the hand-to-hand (and hand-to-bow) battles for which we have been waiting. But only after a point by which the end credits would already be rolling on better-paced features. Even there, it is a bit on the dark side – though after my issues with Immortal Wars, the bar of what qualifies as “a bit on the dark side” has been raised considerably. This is nowhere near as bad, and you still can tell what’s going on, with a bit of peering. There’s a rough energy here which works, although the main impact is to make you wonder where the hell it has been for the rest of the movie. The makers should have sat down to watch the not-dissimilar Flukt, and built on what worked there, such as its steady flow of tension, instead of offering us 90 minutes of meandering around the woods.

Dir: Rasmus Tirzitis
Star: Moa Enqvist Stefansdotter, Yohanna Idha, Viva Östervall Lyngbrant, Ralf Beck

Stalked

★★
“Lacking in military intelligence”

A promising idea has its concept snuffed out by shaky execution and even worse writing. Sam (Rogers) is a former solder and now single mother. When her child falls sick, Sam heads for the chemist’s for medicine. She never gets there, being abducted in a van and rendered unconscious. She wakes in a large warehouse-like facility in the middle of nowhere, which turns out to be a military production facility. She’s not the only woman there, and finds that an invisible adversary, using advanced tech to cloak his presence, is taking advantage of the weekend to turn the place into a stalker’s amusement park. However, Sam’s background perhaps gives her a very particular set of skills, unavailable to the other victims.

I’m generally fairly oblivious to script-holes: Chris is considerably better at spotting them. But here, even I could see the glaring flaws. This is supposedly a cutting-edge military facility, yet the security is so bad, a child can literally get in. The motivation for the villain is poorly drawn, and it’s never explained how the lowly caretaker – for that’s what he is – manages to get to use all of his wonderful toys. Do the army also let soldiers take tanks off to drive around on the weekend? But it’s not as if the film has any confidence in him as a bad guy, for even after Sam has managed to avoid his threat, she then has to handle a military drone. Just one – for like I say, security is pretty bad. And it can easily be taken out with a conveniently to hand brick. If we ever go to war, I swear, we are screwed

If the film had made much of Sam’s background, supposedly in the engineers’ corps, that might have helped. Watching her MacGyver her way against her opponent, using the plentiful material at hand could have been fun. But that would have required thought, something largely absent from the script. There are few points at which we are ever convinced of her military background, and the scenes where she is “fighting” her invisible opponent, all too often reminded me of the Monty Python sketch about self-wrestling. It’s a shame, as Rogers is by no means terrible otherwise, and is quite empathetic.

The same cannot be said for the ending, however. It’s understandable that the writer-director felt the need to tack something on, after the considerably underwhelming confrontation with the drone. What he delivers is the ultra-cliched finale where someone isn’t who they seem to be, but turns out to be the killer. No, those are not a pair of fidget spinners, they are my eyes rolling at this “twist”. At least he has the good grace not to stretch this out, bringing things to a ending that is brisk to the extreme. It’s clear the budget on this was limited, and I forgive it that. The lazy plotting is considerably harder to forgive.

Dir: Justin Edgar
Star: Rebecca Rogers, Nathalie Buscombe, Ian Sharp, Laurence Saunders

Hellcat’s Revenge II: Deadman’s Hand

★★★
“Hello Catty!”

We reviewed Hellcat’s Revenge last year, and I’m pleased to report this is a small but palpable improvement from Kabasinski. Most of the players from its predecessor return, notably biker queen Cat (Neeld), who quickly finds herself framed and locked up in prison. There’s a target on Cat’s back, courtesy of rival gang leader, Rosie (Hamblin), who has formed an unholy alliance with the warden, and slips easily in and out of jail to manage her business, through a basement tunnel. She has driven both Cat’s gang, the Hellcats, and that of her lover, Snake (Kabasinski) off the streets, with the latter supposedly killed. That’s not the case – cue “I thought you were dead” comments to Snake, which I feel have to be an Escape From New York homage – and we soon learn, down is not out. For the tunnel out of jail goes both ways, and can also be Cat’s escape route, allowing her and Snake to take on Rosie and her crew.

It’s nice this largely addressed the issues I had with the first one. For instance, the lack of motorcycles isn’t a problem here, since this time round, it’s more a women-in-prison film – not many bikes in the slammer. And when pursuing the WiP path, it’s a good slice of fun, even if not much more than the usual tropes from the genre e.g. evil warden, sadistic guards, laundry-room brawls, etc. I particularly liked the turn of Dutch (who was in part one, playing a different character) as long-term inmate Vegas. Also: approaching seventy, if the IMDb is to be believed, and still doing a shower scene? Mad props. Hamblin, too, simply looks like a scary prison inmate, all piercings and face tattoos. In a film like this, that’s half the battle, and there’s no shortage of the requisite attitude and jailbird posturing to be found across the female characters.

The film is less impressive on the outside, not least because in the middle, Cat ends up becoming a supporting character in her own film, with Snake taking over. This isn’t as much fun, coming off as more like a low-rent episode of a Sons of Anarchy wannabe [and I speak as a fan of that show], with Snake carving a lone furrow there. I couldn’t help wishing they’d just stuck within the closed confines of those prison walls, where things appeared to be moving along quite nicely, thank you for asking. Things do perk up again once Cat is busted out of jail, and we get the expected face-off between Cat, Snake and their allies against Rosie and her minions. As in the first film, the limited resources do limit the scope of the action, though there’s a “bullet through the head” effect which was a good effort. It’s all slightly more polished this time, and that progression is what you want to see from any low-budget film-maker. Here’s to the next film being Cat III… :)

Dir: Len Kabasinski
Star: Lisa Neeld, Donna Hamblin, Deborah Dutch, Len Kabasinski