Tag: revenge

Shark Huntress

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★½
“Eco-garbage.”

I’ve previously talked about – OK, “ranted” may not be inappropriate – the perils of message movies. But I did wonder whether it was the specific content to which I objected. Would I dislike a film so much, if I was on board with its strident message? On the evidence here, I can confidently state: hell, yes. For this is painfully earnest and hard to watch, much though I agree with the environmental topic, that humanity’s use of plastics are threatening the oceans. An alternative needs to be found. By which I mean, I strongly suggest you find an alternative to watching this movie. The poster has clearly strayed in from a far more entertaining offering, and bears little resemblance to what this provides. 

The heroine is Sheila (Grey), who heads out to a Pacific island, after the disappearance of her mother. The body turns up, showing marks indicating she was eaten by a great white shark. Which is odd, since they’re not found within a thousand miles of the place. Sheila comes increasingly to believe the attack was not a natural occurrence, but engineered by “the plastic people” in response to her mother’s research, which threatened their business. She wants to kill the shark in question, but also expose the truth behind it, and make those responsible pay for their actions. To that end, she teams up with a group of like-minded ecowarriors, to investigate the company. Naturally, the target isn’t just sitting back and letting their nefarious machinations be exposed. 

There is the germ of an interesting idea here, along the lines of Moby Dick, only for it to be ruthlessly strangled in incompetent execution. Far too much time is spent pounding home the message about waste, which should have been used to develop the plot. There is no real antagonist, just an all but faceless corporation, whose actions make little or no sense. I mean, if you want to get rid of somebody, your plan is flying a shark thousands of miles, letting it go and… hoping it eats the target? Later, they’re quite happy to take someone out by more conventional means. Meanwhile, rather than being any kind of shark huntress, it takes Sheila over 65 minutes before she goes past her ankles, anywhere except a hotel swimming-pool for lessons in Diving 1.0.1.

I didn’t mind Grey, despite English not being her first language: there are occasional moments of effective emoting, such as her mother’s funeral. The photography is occasionally good, though the film desperately needs better colour matching. The problems are… everywhere else, such as a supporting character who literally says things like “thumbs-down emoji”. Or an ending of staggering abruptness, which involves a stabbing with a pen and a conveniently passing shark, while low-key elevator music plays in the background. I must admit, long before we reached that point, I was hoping the shark would bring in some of its mates, and consume everyone involved with this, in one giant feeding frenzy. Spoiler alert: no such luck.

Dir: John Riggins
Star: Katrina Grey, Dean Alexandrou, John Flano, Russell Geoffrey Banks

Stressed to Death

  By

★½
“Definitely a stress test.”

The concept here is intriguing. It’s just the execution – and the script in particular – which is bad. A robbery at a convenience store ends in the death of David, the husband to Victoria Garrett (Aldrich). She blames the paramedic on the scene, former soldier Maggie Hart (Holden), for the loss of her spouse, though the incident hits Maggie equally hard. She quits her job, raising daughter Jane (Blackwell) with her husband, commercial real-estate agent, Jason (Gerhardt). But Victoria hasn’t moved on – in probably the film’s most memorably loopy elements, she feeds her husband’s ashes to a pot-plant she calls David, to which she chats. She’s also clearly a believer in that saying about revenge being served cold.

For she waits a whole ten years after the incident, before putting into motion a plan for revenge, hiring a pair of thugs to kill Maggie’s family in front of her. Fortunately for her target, they’re two blithering incompetents – or maybe the script just makes it seem like they were acquired through the ‘Help Wanted’ section of Facebook Marketplace. Adding spice to the situation, she has hired Jason as her subordinate, and Jane turns out to have a crush on Victoria’s son. Complicating matters further is Maggie’s PTSD, which is naturally the movie-friendly version, only kicking in when required by the plot. It can also apparently be cured by violent trauma: specifically, someone hiring a pair of thugs to kill your family in front of you. What are the odds?

Even by the low standards of Lifetime movies, this is bad. It’s not just the script that is sloppy, the production includes a bike helmet suddenly appearing on Jane’s head, and a knife that teleports from the floor into Maggie’s hands. But let’s not kid ourselves: it’s mostly the script. I lost count of the points at which I sighed heavily. Probably peak sigh was achieved at the sequence where Maggie and Jane have been captured. The thug doesn’t just leave them alone, he falls asleep in the next room, allowing them to escape. Guess that whole thugging thing really takes it out of you. Worse, after the mother and daughter get away, they show no urgency at all, wandering around while chatting casually about Jane’s crush. Oh, look: they get caught. Again.

This all builds to a ridiculous excuse for a climax in a motel room, which ends with the police describing what happened to the chief thug. The only things that saves this from total disaster are performances generally better than the story deserves. Holden, in particular, does a decent job with her character, and actually, the chief thug is surprisingly sympathetic, when telling Maggie about his abused childhood. Or something. I expected better from Brian Skiba, an Arizona native who co-wrote this, and whose films Chokehold and .357: Six Bullets for Revenge have previously been reviewed here. While they weren’t great, they look like Oscar-winners beside Stressed to Death. I think I’m the one coming down with a case of PTSD after sitting through this.

Dir: Jared Cohn
Star: Gina Holden, Taylor Blackwell, Sarah Aldrich, Jason Gerhardt

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

Sick Nurses

  By

★★★½
“Nurse Fetish will see you now…”

This is certainly an odd animal. It takes place in and around a Thailand hospital, where one of the physicians, Dr. Tar (Jarujinda), has a lucrative side-scam in selling bodies to… well, if it’s not clear who, there appears to be sufficient demand for them. He is in cahoots with a group of seven nurses, but one of them, his girlfriend Tahwaan (Wachananont), finds out he is having an affair with her sister, Nook (Rujiphan). After she threatens to go to the police, Dr. Tar and the other six nurses kidnap and kill Tahwaan. However, her spirit comes back from the grave, to take brutal vengeance on those responsible for her death. Naturally, the peeved ghost starts with the characters who bore relatively minor culpability, working her way up to Nook and the not-so-good doctor.

Yeah, if you’re into nurse uniforms, this is pretty much an all-you-can-eat buffet of attractive young women wearing these. Even outside that, there are plenty of scenes of them wearing less clothes than everyday expectations. Though, in line with general Thai morality, there’s no actual nudity – even when one of the victims takes a lengthy shower, she does so with her clothes on. Kinda weird, and the “grindhouse” tag here should be read as referring to violence rather than sex. For the meat of the film are extended stalk and slash sequences, in which Tahwaan – or, at least, a malevolent entity taking her form, with darker skin – pursues her targets relentlessly.

Sadly, the final dispatch is typically off-screen, a contrast to Western horror where the kill typically provides the money shot. Here, there is instead good, twisted imagination shown in the lead-up to those points, such as her ability to “control” her victims, or strangle one with her hair. The peak moment is likely the sequence4 where one woman’s lower jaw drops off, then her tongue falls out and is eaten by her cat, a scene which definitely upped the grade here by an extra half-point. Whatever you say about Tahwaan, she has clearly put some effort into planning the demises of those who wronged her.

To some extent, this is just a variation on the common Asian trope of the long-haired ghost girl. The twist here is that we are on Tahwaan’s side, especially once we find out the truth behind her death. It’s definitely a novelty to have someone seeking revenge for their own murder, rather than the more common in our genre, some kind of sexual assault. The plot is clearly nonsense; nobody notices any of the earlier victims are missing, for example, and I’ve no clue what the “13 o’clock” stuff was about. Yet I can’t deny, I found myself having an increasingly fun time, as things escalated, growing more bloody and twisted. Nook shows some fight before eventually allowing the “heroine” to reach her inevitable final target of Dr. Tar. It’s likely no spoiler to say, the confrontation doesn’t end well for him, though perhaps not quite as I wanted.

Dir: Piraphan Laoyont, Thodsapol Siriwiwat
Star: Chol Wachananont, Wichan Jarujinda, Chidjan Rujiphun, Kanya Rattanapetch

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

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.

Fury of a Phoenix by Shannon Mayer

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

Bea is living a quiet life, far out in the Wyoming countryside, with her husband Justin and young son, Bear. However, this isolation is an entirely deliberate choice in order to escape from her past.  For in her previous life, she was Phoenix Romano, an enforcer and hit-woman for her mob boss father. After deciding she’d had enough of that life, she liberated several millions of his money, and vanished, hoping never to be found again. Naturally, things don’t quite work out like that. Justin and Bear are killed in a car crash, but Phoenix has reason to suspect it wasn’t an accident, and that instead her past life is catching up with her. But why did whoever was responsible for that go after her family, and leave her alive?

Alone, this would have potential for a story of revenge. However, Mayer also lobs in a helping of magic, in the form of “abnormals”, who have certain skills that can be used for good or evil. To be honest, this was not an idea which felt developed adequately – barely at all, in fact – and seemed almost a sop so that the book could be sold in the urban fantasy genre. For example, the fact that her father had entered a pact with the devil for his fortune, didn’t make any particular difference, and could easily have been entirely left out. He could simply have been a powerful gangster – except perhaps for the three hellspawn guardians protecting him. And only one of them see action in this first volume. I did like her talking guns, though again this is an idea which feels underdeveloped. Perhaps later books explore these in more details? On the other hand, there’s something to be said for a heroine without any magic ‘get out of jail free’ talent cards to play.

The good news is, there’s enough going on in the mundane world to make for a solid enough read. There really can’t be much better motivation for revenge, than a mother having to watch helplessly as her child’s life is torn away. Just about everything thereafter develops in a fluid fashion from this, as she reconnects with her old life and finds out the unpleasant truths about… Well, quite a few things, in fact – not least that Justin wasn’t exactly the innocent winter sports professional he appeared. I did have some qualms over her wanting to tell the perpetrator she was coming for them; it seems like bravado, making Nix’s task needlessly more difficult. But I guess, if it’s good enough for Beatrix Kiddo, it’s good enough for any vengeful action heroine. Despite (or, probably more likely, because of) the blatant cliff-hanger, this is probably not a series I’m going to bother delving any further into. However, I can’t say I felt like I wasted the time spent reading it.

Author: Shannon Mayer
Publisher: Hijinks Ink Publishing, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
1 of 4 in the Nix series.

Revenge is Her Middle Name

  By

★★½
“Junkie. Whore. Mother?”

This is an unashamedly grimy item, whose main character, Cat (Brennan), we first meet turning tricks in a back-alley. She then goes home to her equally addicted boyfriend, Dolph (Schneider), whom she is trying to convince to get her pregnant. Eventually, her mission succeeds, and to provide for their impending child, they rob their dealer. Cat then bails on Dolph, leaving him to take the fall, and gets her act at least somewhat cleaned up, with the help of friend Marilynn (Bellin). Eight months later, however, neighbourhood boss Mutton Chop (Bell), shows up on her doorstep with his thugs, and extracts a particularly vicious form of revenge. Seven further years pass, and Cat is just about back to normal, when the violent behaviour of a man she meets in a bar awakens her inner Ms. 45. She’s soon cutting up his corpse with a hacksaw and stuffing it into garbage bags, then progresses to extracting long-dormant vengeance on her attackers.

There’s no doubt, this wears its grindhouse attitude mostly on its sleeve – except for a strange unwillingness on the part of its lead actress, to take off her clothes. There’s no shortage of gore, certainly, and it’s the kind of film after which you’ll probably want to take a shower. It wallows, unapologetically, in the worst that human nature has to offer. However, that’s as much a flaw as a strength. This kind of film works best – indeed, works at all – when you can feel some sympathy for the protagonist as she goes through hell. Here, that’s not the case. Cat is hardly a nice person, and is perhaps the best argument for forced sterilization I’ve seen in a long time: she hardly seems fit to be a mother, and comes over as an entirely selfish creature. Dolph is no more than a sperm-donor, and she spurns all Marilyn’s efforts to help her, until Cat wants them. The person I feel most sorry for, is her foetus.

The look of the film is considerably more low-fi than the poster, though it’s not inappropriate to the generally scuzzy atmosphere. It could probably have benefited from some trimming, as there are points where things do drag. The actual “revenge” which appears in large, red letter on the promo image, doesn’t arrive until well into the second half. I’d likely have started by editing out the pair of detectives, who serve no purpose at all. This is the kind of movie which needs to keep moving forward in order to hold the audience’s attention, as most of the performances are little more than functional, especially among the cartoonish villains. Credit to Brennan though, for going full throttle into her portrayal. By the end of this, if I was still some way short of liking her character, Cat was someone I’d certainly not want to cross. If I have no interest in seeing this again, I don’t feel as if the time was entirely wasted.

Dir: Anthony Matthews
Star: Lissa Brennan, Douglass Bell, Paula Bellin, Michael Todd Schneider

Revenge Ride

  By

★★½
“Violence isn’t the answer. No, wait…”

Mary (Dubasso) is drugged and raped by three members of the football team at a college party. Believing neither the college authorities nor the police will do anything, she turns to cousin Maggie (Swan) for help, because her relative is a member of the all-female Dark Moon motorcycle gang (eloquent slogan: “Eat my pussy”). Run by Trygga (McIntosh), they take revenge on the rapists, branding their catchphrase on the perpetrator’s asses, and leaving them in full view on the college campus. The fraternity boys don’t take this kindly, and strike back, causing things to escalate towards an all-out war. Complicating matters are Maggie’s increasing feelings for Brian (Boneta), one of the team, though uninvolved in the rape.

If ever they do a Daughters of Anarchy series, McIntosh needs to be the lead She has the perfect physical and psychological presence for the role, and is perfectly cast here. Seeing her, drenched in blood, whacking someone’s brains out with an iron chain, is sufficient reason for this to exist. Unfortunately, it’s about all this has to offer. The script is full of mis-steps, mostly a result of trying to cram too much into a running time which barely reaches 70 minutes before the credits roll. As a result, the relationship between Maggie and Brian feels unconvincing, and Mary’s induction into the gang is also deeply rushed. What, no time as a prospect? From my deep knowledge of their culture (obtained entirely from having watched every episode of Sons of Anarchy), I know it’s not typically harder to get into a sorority than a biker gang.

That said, the idea that three footballers would be able to hold their own against, and pose a threat to, the entire ranks of Dark Moon membership, doesn’t exactly sell them as the set of bad-ass bitches they’re supposed to be. The action scenes also leave a good amount to be desired, McIntosh’s chain-swinging aside, and the finale feels unnecessarily rushed, as if the makers ran out of money and had to end things without getting to film an acceptable wrap-up. Despite efforts to address their absence, the complete lack of interest by the authorities in the mayhem as it unfolds, stretches credulity as well.

Philosophically, it does seem to change its answer in the middle. Is violence acceptable or not? Initially, it seems gung-ho in favour of vengeance. While Mary eventually rejects this, it seems to be only when it threatens to engulf Brian, so appears to be for personal reasons, rather than any modification of her world-view. It feels as if the makers want the audience to reject the notion… while also using it to fuel an adrenaline rush of righteous justice. Perhaps, again, if the film had taken the time to depict Mary’s attitude adjustment, it could have brought viewers along with her. Instead, it all feels a bit hypocritical. I will, however, continue to watch McIntosh in anything and everything.

Dir: Melanie Aitkenhead
Star: Serinda Swan, Pollyanna McIntosh, Vanessa Dubasso, Diego Boneta