Tag: u

Unit 234

  By

★★
“Lock out while you rock out.”

File this synopsis under technically true: “After the shocking discovery of an unconscious man in a locked unit, the lone employee of a remote storage facility must fight to survive the night against a ruthless gang, dead set on retrieving their precious cargo – at any cost.” I guess the word with which I have the most reason to quibble is probably “fight”. For heroine Laurie Saltair (Fugrman) is more from the Brave Sir Robin school of fighting, if you’ve ever seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail. She’s much more inclined to avoid confrontation than seek it out. Which perhaps making sense when facing a larger, better armed and more experienced enemy. But where’s the fun in that?

The man in question is Clayton (Huston), who is on a gurney having been kidnapped from hospital by Jules (Johnson), who is keen to finish the job. What job is that? Well, you find this out towards the end, when Laurie does, and it certainly upends much of what has gone before, to the point you’d be forgiven for annoyance at the film having perhaps wasted your time. What unfolds is, Laurie rescuing Clayton, and they then have to try and escape the storage facility and/or call for help, while Jules and his men hunt them both. Naturally, neither prove exactly successful, and that’s hos the plot unfolds. Mostly through the maze of passages in the facility, with a brief excursion outside for fresh air. 

There’s potential here: imagine a film where the heroine can crack open storage units and use the contents against the villains. This kinda happens here – only in about the dumbest and most implausible way you could imagine. Seriously: of all the things potentially to utilize, this was the way Laurie went? I think it was probably the moment at which the film jumped the shark for me, and it was never able to… I guess, un-jump itself thereafter. I feel a vague sense of loss at this, since the central performance are fine. Fuhrman is an engaging heroine, and Johnson is effective in his role. Weirdly, after non-GWG film Day of Reckoning, it’s the second this week where an ambivalent character coughs up blood. Go figure. 

It also felt like Laurie only became pro-active at the end of the movie, when it was necessary for the plot. When it happened, part of me was relieved it had finally happened – it probably just pushed the film over the line for inclusion on this site. However, there was another part of me that wondered where the hell this had come from, because it simply didn’t fit in with Laurie’s passive approach to that point. I may have been somewhat prejudiced by Fuhrman’s track record in Orphan: First Kill, where she’s more aggressive. This definitely needed a heroine along similar lines, although it’s the script, and its inability to unlock the potential, which feels the biggest weakness. 

Dir: Andy Tennant
Star: Isabelle Fuhrman, Don Johnson, Jack Huston, James DuMont

Undercover

  By

★★★½
“The long game.”

It’s surprising to me that there are currently no English-language external reviews listed for this on the IMDb. It’s certainly worthy of notice outside its native Spain, where it was nominated for thirteen Goyas, the local equivalent of the Oscars, winning Best Film and Best Actress. It takes place over a number of years around the turn of the millennium, when the Spanish state was in a notorious and bloody war against ETA, a terrorist group fighting for the independence of the Basque region. Mónica (Yuste) is a cop who is recruited by Angel (Tosar) to go deep undercover, and infiltrate ETA in order to provide information on the group, its members and their plans.

This takes a very long time, the group understandably being suspicious of outsiders and extremely cautious about in whom they put their faith. We dip into the life of “Arantxa”, the new identity of Mónica, as she becomes active in the separatist movement, laying the groundwork to be seen as reliable and, more importantly, trustworthy. It takes six years before she is finally allowed entrance and given a mission of note: providing shelter for Kepa (Gastesi), an ETA member on the run. Having gained his confidence, she is then brought in to a bigger plan, bringing leader Sergio (Anido) back into Spain, and restablishing an ETA cell in San Sebastian, to attack judges, police and other targets. 

There isn’t anything particularly new here. You can probably tick off the story elements as they show up, if you’ve seen any other “undercover cop” thrillers along the same lines. It’s basically a series of narrow escapes in which Arantxa’s true identity is almost discovered. Sergio finds the phone she uses to talk to Angel, for example, or she is almost unable to return a folder after she passed it to the cops for copying. She starts to have feelings for Kepa too, while Angel faces resistance to the operation from the highers-up. Oh, and #Sexism, because it’s Spain. All fairly boilerplate stuff. However, the secret sauce is in the execution, which Echevarría does with no shortage of skill, particularly when it comes to dialling up the tension.

It is based on a true story, though to what extent it’s accurate, I can’t say. Here, not knowing the eventual outcome going in, except at the highest level (I was aware that ETA ended up disbanding) is likely a help. Because you won’t know whether or not Mónica completes her mission successfully – and, a different question, makes it out alive. I did appreciate there’s not much effort at moral grey here. Sometimes a terrorist is just a bad guy, and if you have any doubts about Sergio, his treatment of Monica’s cat will dissolve those [If they do not, we really can’t be friends!] Again, it’s not the subtlest of plotting. Yet between it and Echevarria’s skilled hand, it all undeniably gets the job done.

Dir: Arantxa Echevarría
Star: Carolina Yuste, Luis Tosar, Iñigo Gastesi, Diego Anido
a.k.a. La Infiltrada

Unleashing the Tiger, by Jerry Furnell

  By

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

I don’t subscribe to the belief that authors need to be the same sex, race, religion or whatever as their characters. A good author can put you inside the head of their heroine, even if they’re a different species, an extra-terrestrial, or whatever. But there needs to be an authenticity of voice for it to work. This is where, for example, Quentin Tarantino fails for me: his characters almost always end up sounding like Quentin Tarantino. And I wrote that before noticing the blurb on Amazon actually says, “Jerry Furnell exudes a Quentin Tarantino vibe in his narrative.” That’s meant as an incentive; I’d have taken it as a warning.

For the problem here is similar, exacerbated by the adoption of a first-person narrative. The heroine is Camilla Lee, described as “an eighteen-year-old Kung Fu black belt”, of Chinese extraction, who lives in Australia. The author, however, is a British man in his sixties, and frankly, it shows. Camilla never comes off as anything except sounding like a fairly dubious fantasy of what a teenage girl is like. Not least because the instant Camilla turns eighteen, she immediately becomes a raging nympho. It’s borderline creepy. And indeed, one scene of sexual assault removes the word “borderline” from that sentence. I’m not sure if it’s intended to be repellent or arousing, and as a result ends up in a very odd place.

The story is okay, if familiar. Camilla’s parents are murdered in a home invasion, and she barely survives. She’s convinced this wasn’t a burglary gone wrong, and eventually discovers it’s connected to her father having betrayed his Triad employers back when he lived in Hong Kong. She heads back there – pausing only to give the passenger sitting next to her a hand-job, I kid you not – to confront Mr. Wu, the leader of the Seven Dragons gang and make him pay for his crimes. Oh, and she’s also getting bullied at school. She makes them pay too, in no uncertain fashion. Although only after Camilla has engaged in self-mutilation, and been prevented from committing suicide by the unexpected arrival of a friendly dog in the park.

To be fair, in the “From the author” section on Amazon, Furnell cheerfully admits, “The mix of sex and violence will appeal to some readers and appall others. Reviews suggest you will either love it or hate it.” He’s not wrong, and no prizes for guessing on what side of the fence I fall. Which is weird, because regular site visitors will know, I’m hardly averse to gratuitous sex and senseless violence. Here, the latter is fine, with some interesting fights as Camilla works her way through the Seven Dragons to meet her nemesis. But even here, she has to dress up as a prostitute to get into the building. And did I mention the lesbian sex? Though Furnell does lag Tarantino in one department. At least there’s no foot fetishism. 

Author: Jerry Furnell
Publisher: Self-published, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 3 in the Naked Assassin Series.

The Undeserving

  By

★★★
“Save a horse, ride a cowgirl.”

I’m slightly grading this on a curve, because this is likely the best of the low-budget modern blaxploitation movies I’ve seen, by some margin. By “normal” standards, that still falls some way short of Oscar-winning, with the limited resources still being obvious at some point. But compared to some of the other entries I’ve sat through, this is a palpable improvement, avoiding many of the worst cliches of the genre, in favor of a story which has had some attention given to it. It’s not an African-American knockoff of Scarface, like so many others, and does not entirely rely on a soundtrack of bad rap songs by the director’s pals. That alone puts it ahead of the pack.

It begins with an assassination carried out by arms dealer Lion Caldwell (Russell). He’s wants to kill the person who’s blackmailing him, and make it look like he’s the target. But to ensure there are no loose ends, he will also kill the hitwoman, Harper (Lavan). However, the intended target gets wind of the plan, and switches wigs with an innocent bystander, causing Harper to shoot the wrong target: Lion’s ex-wife, and the mother of his daughter. The whole mess ends up with Harper dumped in a lake, shot multiple times, and stabbed for good measure. Of course, she’s not dead. She is able to make her way to shore, where’s she’s rescued by a couple. The husband is a surgeon, and able to patch her up in-house, rather than notify the authorities. Yeah, I rolled my eyes a bit at that.

Thereafter, Harper makes her way back to her family, from whom she has been estranged, following a gun accident. Her sister, Fire (Curstin), is less than impressed to see her sibling back. Word reaches Lion that his tidying up hasn’t been successful, so he sends his top man, First (Peri), to take care of Harper once and for all. Should her family get in the way, who cares? If you’re thinking this could end up blowing back on Lion… yeah. There’s more thought into this than I expected, though the plot remains imperfect. There’s a second woman left for dead in the lake, but that doesn’t appear to go anywhere much.

I did like a lot the setting for this being “black country”, for want of a better phrase. Not seen a film with that background before; this genre is typically light on horse-riding: Beyonce has a lot to answer for, I suspect! The action is a bit of a mixed bag – some moments work considerably better than others – and there’s some very bad CGI for a gas-pump explosion. But the characters are as well-written as the script, with some unexpected elements. For example, Lion is trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter, in a similar way to Harper and her family. Based on this, I’d not be averse to looking at more of Elmore’s work.

Dir: Joseph A. Elmore Jr.
Star: Nyra Lavan, Oshea Russell, King Curstin, Joshua Peri

Undefeatable

  By

★★★
“Keep an eye out for you, Stingray.”

The traditional rule of thumb is, Cynthia Rothrock’s Hong Kong movies are good, but her American ones are bad. The question is, what category should this one be placed? On the one hand, it’s a Hong Kong production. On the other, it’s filmed in America, with an American cast. On the third hand, it’s directed by notorious schlockmeister Ho, as “Godfrey Hall”. I’m painfully aware how much his work can vary in quality, though I’ll confess, I am generally adequately amused. The results here are a real grab-bad of the good, the bad and the laughable. Put it this way: Cynthia is probably close to the best actor. That’s not something you’ll hear often.

She plays former gang member Kristi Jones, now trying to go straight. But in order to put her sister through medical school, Kristi raises money by taking part in street fights, arranged through her former colleagues in the Red Dragons. Meanwhile, Paul (Niam), a.k.a. “Stingray”, another fighter on the underground circuit, goes mad after his wife leaves him. He begins kidnapping, torturing and killing any woman who resembled his departed spouse. Unfortunately, his victims include Kristi’s sister, and she’s not happy about it. With the help of police detective Nick DiMarco (Miller) and psychiatrist Dr. Jennifer Simmons (Jason), Kristi makes her way through various opponents who might be involved, before focusing on Paul, and the warehouse from which he operates.

This is all, quite obviously, total nonsense. It’s the kind of film where everyone is adept at martial arts – even Dr. Simmons throws a few punches when she gets a visit from Stingray. It’s also the kind of film where a police officer will let the sister of a murder victim tag along on his investigation, because reasons. One wonders how much direction Ho was actually giving the cast. In particular, Niam, whose entire performance seems to revolve around making veins pop in his forehead. There is one (1) decent scene, where Dr. Simmons tries to figure out Stingray’s traumas and issues (his Mommy was bad to him or someting), in order to use them against him and escape. It’s the only moment this rises above the utterly basic.

On the other hand, we’re not here for the psychology. We’re here for the ass-kicking, and the film has no shortage of this, with Ms. Rothrock in decent form, both with her fists and some weapons. There’s a nice – if entirely pointless – scene of her doing forms on the lawn outside her house. But it’s mostly reasonably well-staged hand-to-hand fights, and there’s no question Rothrock acquits herself well. The end fight is slightly disappointing, in that Kristi has been hurt in a previous encounter with Stingray, so has one arm in a sling, and needs help from DiMarco. However, there are not one but two groanworthy eighties action one-liners there: the one in the tag-line above is perhaps only second worst. I couldn’t call this good, yet was I not entertained? Yes. Yes, I was.

Dir: Godfrey Ho
Star: Cynthia Rothrock, John Miller, Don Niam, Donna Jason

Under Lock and Key

  By

★★★
“From prison to fashion.”

I can’t recall seeing an action heroine movie with quite so much gratuitous nudity, even among the women-in-prison genre in which this (obviously, given both the title and the poster) operates – at least in the early going. It feels like there’s some kind of contractual obligation for a shower, medical exam or just an inmate randomly changing their clothes, about every three minutes in the first half hour. It’s helps that most of the residents appear to be incarcerated for crimes involving beauty parlours. Either that, or there is some kind of quality threshold applies for inmates. I should mention this does adhere to the standards of the nineties: and I’m not speaking about hair on the head, if you know what I mean.

It’s not entirely devoid of story-line, however, and there is an actual plot. Danielle Peters (Westbrook) is an FBI agent who has been sent undercover into the prison. Her mission is to get close to another inmate, Sarah Sands (Smith), who was the girlfriend of a drug kingpin, Carlos Vega (Anthony). Sarah still has a notebook containing compromising information, and Danielle is tasked with finding out its location. It doesn’t go well. Sarah is killed when the vehicle transferring them both gets ambushed, and to make matters worse, Vega kidnaps Danielle’s daughter as leverage. The whole undercover thing ends, with Danielle formally taken off the case. Naturally, she continues her investigation anyway – albeit after a long. hot shower – along with prison guard and new pal, Tina Lamb (Niven).

Let me be 100% clear. None of this makes the slightest bit of sense from the perspective of law enforcement or the penitentiary industry. Danielle’s wilful disregard for FBI procedure never gets her anything that a light tap on the wrist from her boss. And by FBI procedure, I mean the pair committing homicide (arguably justifiable), leading to this exchange with Tina:
    “What do we do with the body?”
    “I’ll call a friend, he’ll take care of it”
That’s not very FBI now, is it? Meanwhile, Tina doesn’t even call to let her employers know she’s going to be busy for a while, taking down an international drug lord ‘n’ stuff. Everyone involved, including their boss, is going to be faced with difficult performance appraisals, when it comes time for their annual review.

Plausibility very much aside, I can’t deny I was entertained by the ludicrous nature of this, which basically aims for the lowest common denominator of cinema, and somehow still manages to come up short. How can you not love a film containing the line, “Jennifer’s not only a high fashion model, but she also works for several European secret service agencies on occasion”? Especially when Jennifer has the blank, placid expression of a cud-chewing bovine. Westbrook does a better job, on occasion looking like her kicks and punches have impact, and having decent presence. While I’ll likely never watch this again, I’m certainly holding back any complaints.

Dir: Henri Charr
Star: Wendi Westbrook, Barbara Niven, K. Phillip Anthony, Stephanie Ann Smith

Sinister: Unhallowed, by Christopher P. Young and John Logsdon

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

This seems to come from a subset of a whole slew of Paranormal Police Department series in which Logsdon is involved with various authors, e.g. NYPPD. I don’t believe you need to have read those, although I did feel a bit dumped in at the deep end here. Evangeline is a resident of a demonic realm and member of House Sinister, a group who are all but wiped out in a surprise attack. Key words: “all but”. The job needs to be finished, but before that can happen, Evangeline flees to the human world – Los Angeles in particular – taking over the body of a rich socialite who conveniently just died in a car crash, so is ripe for possession.

Evangeline shouldn’t be there at all, and consequently ends up press-ganged into the local Black Ops wing of the PPD. This basically makes her an assassin to order, of “certain criminal elements,” alongside her partners, the hellwolf Kayson and Q, a vampire. She’s fine with that, being a hellion herself. However, those who tried to take her out in the netherworld, are keen to complete the job. They send their own operatives to Los Angeles, to locate the fugitive final member of House Sinister, and end her life. She won’t go out easily: especially when her precious me-time is broken into by one such killer: “Never interrupt a woman who is about to eat dessert!”

This is a bit of a mixed bag. The overall setting isn’t bad, with a milieu which includes every kind of fantasy creature you can imagine, from pixies through succubi and were-bears to orcs, co-existing both in the human world and on their own turf (for some loose definition of “co-exist”, anyway). Evangeline is a “hellion,” and I’d have welcomed being told a bit more about what that is: “demons mixed with dragon blood,” is about all the explanation you get, and is not particularly helpful. She is a bit – okay, make that very – sex-obsessed, and this is written in a way that it comes across as if she was still an irritating teenager. Mature subject matter, discussed in an immature fashion, if you will. Not really my favourite approach.

However, it does end up gelling better than I expected. After feeling like a moderate slog in the early going, I ploughed through the last quarter in a single sitting. In it, Evangeline and her partners are trying to assassinate crime boss Macy Bale. while simultaneously being hunted by Moloch, the entity tasked with ending House Sinister. It’s almost non-stop action, with a particularly cinematic tone. Although there is not much in terms of a resolution – more a pause than a finish – I found myself curious where the story would go. More things coming to find Evangeline seems a fairly safe bet…

Author: Christopher P. Young and John Logsdon
Publisher: Crimson Myth Press, available through Amazon, both as a paperback and an e-book
Book 1 of 6 in the Black Ops Paranormal Police Department series.

The Undaunted Wudang

  By

★★★
“Ground and pound.”

Chinese kung-fu movies took off in the early eighties, after the success of Shaolin Temple, starring an unknown teenager called Jet Li. Over the years that followed, a slew of imitators followed, with varying success. Where these largely differed from their Hong Kong counterparts, were in a more grounded approach to combat: wire-work and trampolines were avoided, in favour of players who (like Li) were martial artists first, and actors second. I believe the same is true of the heroine here, though information about Lin is hard to come by. According to the IMDb, this was her acting debut, though it’s tricky to grade her work there, thanks to the rather clunky dubbing on the print viewed for this review.

It takes place in the late 19th century, when countries like Japan were sending martial artists over to China, to fight the local masters. Chen Xue Jiao (Lin) is part of one such family, whose father dies in mysterious circumstances, and her brother is then killed by the Japanese [it’s not clear from the context if he’s her sibling, or just a colleague in their school]. She’s also on the Japanese hit-list, but escapes with the help of conveniently passing kung-fu expert,  Si Ma Jian (Zhao). Discovering the truth about her father’s death – which I won’t spoil, but really, your first guess is gonna be correct – she finds sanctuary at the Nashan Temple in the Wudang Mountains. There, the head priest (Ma) teaches her the necessary skills to take on her treacherous classmates and the Japanese.

This just about counterbalances an extremely prosaic and cliched plot with the undeniable competence of the martial artists on view. Sun has absolutely no sense of style as a director, yet that’s really the best approach for the film. You just want someone to point the camera in the direction of the performers, so as to appreciate the grace and strength on view, of Lin in particular. The problem here is, apart from that, and some quite pretty Chinese landscapes (especially around the temple), there’s not enough to sustain interest. The pacing is questionable, with Chen not even finding out a pivotal fact about her father’s death until the half-way point. While even the training sequences have some appeal, her actual revenge occupies only the last fifteen minutes or so.

I’m in the middle between the two camps of thought in regard to martial arts films, with no particular preference for either the high-flying and spectacular, or the grounded and more realistic style. For me, it’s all about the execution, and whether it’s done well. Here, it feels as if all the effort went into the action. While the most important part of proceedings, it’s not the sole element that matters. To make a great martial-arts movie, you still need characters and a plot. Otherwise, you’ve got the equivalent of a meal where the main course may be delicious, but the dessert sucks, the service is brusque, and the cloakroom loses your coat. That’s about what you have here.

Dir: Sha Sun
Star: Quan Lin, Changjun Zhao, Yuwen Li, Zhenbang Ma
a.k.a. Wudang

Useless

  By

★½
“[Obvious comment redacted]”

Giving your film a title like this is basically asking for trouble. It gives snarky critics an extremely easy weapon to wield against the movie. That’s especially so when it’s a low-budget effort, made with considerably more heart than skill. It’s not without merit, especially in the photography. It is crisp and does a good job of capturing some beautiful Montana scenery – there’s a reason the state is nicknamed Big Sky Country – and the rodeo action. The problems are in a script which never met a cliché it didn’t like, and performances that do little or nothing to elevate the material.

The very first scene has a mother professing her love to her daughter, Jessie (Wilson). Two minutes later, she dies in a car accident. That’s a good indicator of the level of plotting you can expect from this. Jessie goes to live with her uncle Mick (Bracich) and mopes around. A lot. She is eventually brought out of her shell after Mick buys her an equally broken equine called Lucky – I presume this is where the title comes from. Girl and horse bond, help each other to heal, and take part in the sport of barrel racing. This had apparently been her mother’s favourite pastime; not that we knew anything about this before she died, of course. I also hope you know all the intricacies of barrel racing, for the film assumes you do, rather than bothering to explain anything about it.

I get that Montana is a different world, with a slower pace of life. Yet the dramatic approach here is beyond low-key, to the point of soporific. Even when Mick has a stroke (damn, this family has some poor luck), Jessie’s reaction barely registers above the level of slight annoyance. It feels very much that Wilson was chosen, not for her dramatic abilities, rather her talent in the saddle.  To this non-horse person, she looked solid there: it turns out she was the 2017 Montana High School Rodeo Association Champion Barrel Racer, and has been in the sport since she was 4. So her action scenes are authentic and work. When she opens her mouth? Not so much. The subplot in which she has to chose between nice nerd Kyle (Christensen) and bad boy bull-rider Blaze (Olson), falls flatter than huckleberry pancakes as a result.

At the other end of the spectrum, is the musical score. This doesn’t so much enhance proceedings, as signal the intended emotions enthusiastically. It’s probably the first time a soundtrack could be accused of blatantly over-acting. Not that there is any particular sense of dramatic escalation. Instead of, say, building to a big barrel racing competition, things peak with an illicit party at which – gasp! ‐ alcohol is being drunk. While there is a contest at the end, with no build-up, it is also severely lacking in impact. It’s clear this was a project born out of and fuelled by passion. It’s also very apparent, that alone falls well short of being enough. 

Dir: Josiah Burdick
Star: Brooke Wilson, Mark Bracich, Michael Christensen, Brian Olson

Unchained

  By

★★
“Needs a short leash”

This likely suffered, having been watched the day after Boyka: Unleashed which, while not an action heroine film by any stretch of the imagination, is a near-perfect demonstration of how brutal, no-holds barred fights should be filmed. I can only guess that “Raphaello” never saw Boyka: Unleashed. And since he also co-wrote, co-produced, shot and edited this thing, pretty much all the blame for its shortcomings has to be laid at his feet. I say this, since the performances, if hardly Oscar-winning, are likely the least of the film’s worries. Even if Eric Roberts may have literally phoned, or these days, Zoomed in his role, straight from his living-room couch, as the story-telling father of the heroine.

She is Aella (Mulroney), an ex-soldier who is now desperately seeking work to fend off the bills that are piling up. She goes to audition for a role in a movie about an underground fight club, only to be bopped on the head, and wake up in – what are the odds! – an underground fight club. There’s she is forcibly trained by The Warden (Andrews, looking like the resurrected corpse of Lemmy from Motorhead) and his sidekick Regina. The latter is played by Valkyrie – that’s not her real name, she’s a pro wrestler whom we remember from Lucha Underground,  and is married to the more well-known John Morrison. From here, things progress more or less as you’d expect, with Aella and her fellow captives fighting each other, while plotting a break for freedom.

It is, as noted, the technical aspects which are woefully inept here. “Raphaello” seems incapable of holding the camera steady and pointing it in the same direction for more than two seconds during the fight scenes, which are borderline unwatchable as a result. Mind you, the participants appear largely unfamiliar with how to throw a punch; odd consider Aella’s supposed military background. Not helping matters are the tedious training montages, terrible soundtrack, and resources which fall well short of the high-end operation supposedly taking place, where women are sold for six-figure sums. I’m pretty sure the entire film did not cost anywhere near six figures. Then there’s the ending, where a giant fireball kills all the bad people, while the heroine escapes unscathed… by turning her back on it. I kid you not.

If more a disaster movie than an action one, in the sense of being a disaster, I will say, I did keep watching. As noted earlier, this is mostly due to decent performances. Mulroney has about the right mix of resilience and insolence for the role, while both Andrews and Valkyrie are cut from suitably villainous cloth. In better hands – such as the people behind Boyka: Unleashed – the actors and actresses could have been part of something entertaining. As is, it largely goes to prove that, no matter how many hyphens “Raphaello” may string into his credentials, there’s no substitute for talent. 

Dir: Raphaello
Star: Mair Mulroney, Larry L Andrews, Taya Valkyrie, Maricris Lapaix