Jack Squad 2: The Next Generation

★½
“Do you know what the definition of insanity is?”

This is a question posed by the bad guy (Fears) towards the end of this, and of course, he provides the usual explanation in response: “It’s doing the same thing, expecting different results.” After watching this, I would choose to adjust it slightly. A valid definition of insanity is making the same movie, and expecting different results. Because it is, more or less, what Rankins has done here: it’s a remake of his own movie from fourteen years ago, Jack Squad. Now, there’s something to be said for that. I mean, Cecil B. DeMille did The Ten Commandants twice, while directors from Hitchcock to Michael Haneke have remade their own films. 

The difference is, they were kinda busy. For instance, Hitchcock directed twenty-five features between his two versions of The Man Who Knew Too Much. Since the original Jack Squad in 2009, Rankins has made just one feature: Angry Kelly in 2014. Did he not manage to come up with more than one original idea in a decade and a half? And that count is presuming Angry Kelly is not about a man who is annoyed because he was drugged and robbed by a trio of women. I’ve not seen it, I can’t say. Here, we get a little variation at the start, where the original Jack Squad get hunted down, and a bit at the end, where there’s dissension in the ranks over hidden money.

In the middle though? It’s a blatant re-make. Three young women decide to make money by drugging and robbing men. This goes wrong, when one of the targets is a courier for a violent drug boss, carrying a large sum of cash. They make the ill-advised decision to hold onto the money, a choice which brings them into the crosshairs of its real owner. If anything, we have even less going on this time. It’s a good half-hour before the new trio, of Cassie (Green), Nikki (Alexander) and Cam (Lynn) put their scheme into action. I guess there is at least some altruism, the goal – at least initially, before the designer shopping kicks in – being to cover the medical bills run up by one of the trio’s mother.

The overwhelming sense of deja vu here is what knocks the overall rating here down below the original. I mean, the three characters feel almost like bad photocopies of their predecessors. There’s one who has qualms about the whole concept, while another refuses to give it up at any cost. It’s likely a little more technically competent, though at basically two hours long, is still painfully over-long. There’s a weird subplot where one of the women has a mentally challenged brother, who wants to be a baseball pitcher. This does eventually show relevance, though the way it does, might have you wishing they hadn’t bothered. If we don’t get Jack Squad 3 until 2037, I am completely fine with that. 

Dir: Simuel Denell Rankins 
Star: DeShon Green, Samiah Alexander, Tinesha Lynn, Gregory J. Fears

Snatched

★★½
“Everything comes to he who waits. Eventually.”

The title here seems quite deliberately a nod towards Taken, which similarly has an ex-government operative chewing up and spitting out bad guys, after they make the fatal mistake of abducting the operative’s child. In this case, it’s CIA operative Angela (Bozeman), who lost her husband Jason in murky circumstances, but subsequently put away Dmitri (Weber), the criminal mastermind responsible. Now, six years later, she can get on with living her life, bringing up son Jason Jr. (Cheatham), and hanging out with fellow agent Byron, who seems a possible husband replacement. Well, until Dmitri escapes from prison and starts killing off everyone he considers responsible for putting him behind bars.

Sooner or later – and as we’ll see, it’s not the former – that brings him into Angela’s circle, and ends up in him kidnapping Junior, with the aim of luring her into his (very well-appointed, it has to be said; I particularly liked the chandelier) lair. However, he doesn’t realize what he has done. Once this all gets going, it’s not bad. If hardly seeming an accurate portrayal of CIA practices, unless they’re utterly slipshot and incompetent, it’s kinda fun as long as you don’t ask awkward questions. Such as, where the heck does Angela get those groovy remote-controlled gun-toting little cars? Was Andy Sidaris having an estate sale? Dmitri also has a groovy bad-ass sidekick, Sophia (Camille Osborne), though her fight with Angela is disappointingly brief.

The problem is mostly the long, meandering, roundabout and largely uninteresting way in which the story gets to the amusing stuff. The first half or more is largely comprised of extremely conversational scenes of merely passing interest. In these, Angela talks to Byron about wanting to retire. Or talks to Junior about the realities of her career. Or talks to her mother, Carolyn (Hubert), about her not really a relationship with Byron. Dear lord, it’s far from the action-packed trailer, and you would certainly be forgiven if you gave up on all this soapy drama. Though I was eventually entertained by Carolyn’s ability to kick ass in a grandmotherly way, like Pam Grier on an AARP outing. At least until she encounters Sophia, anyway.

The score above is likely a composite, with two stars for the first half and three for the second, when things do reach an acceptable level of entertainment. Bozeman seems better known as a singer, but does a decent job of portraying the highly upset mother, and has a terse style of close-combat that is effective. On the plus side, it is quite gory, with a number of head-shots and other fairly graphic deaths. On the minus side, these are mostly CGI, as is apparent from the blood spray never landing on anything in the environment. You probably want to have something on hand for the sluggish early proceedings: either a good book, some snacks or an alcoholic beverage would all serve that purpose.

Dir: Chris Stokes
Star: Veronika Bozeman, Charlie Weber, Jered Cheatham, Janet Hubert

Call Her King

★★½
“Tries hard to be Trial Hard

After the impressive surprise which was Jericho Ridge, I figured I should try out another BET Original movie and see how it fared. As the grade above should tell you, the answer is comparatively poorly. While technically adequate in most departments, it’s one of the more implausible Die Hard knockoffs I’ve seen. In a world where No Contest exists, that takes some doing. The high concept here is “Die Hard in a court-house” with Judge Jaeda King (Naughton) about to pronounce sentence in the trial of convicted murderer Sean Samuels (Mitchell). Barely has she said “death”, when the court is stormed by a force led by Sean’s brother Gabriel (Gross), a.k.a. “Black Caesar”.

King escapes the initial onslaught, along with Sean, his defense attorney, and Stryker (Messner), one of the courthouse guards. Gabriel, however, is not just interested in freeing his brother. He also puts the prosecuting attorney on trial in a kangaroo court, designed to prove the flaws and biases inherent in the system. Much of the film is therefore split between King and her group trying to figure out how to survive, as well as escape, and the courtroom side of things, where nasty little secrets are revealed, such as the prosecutor’s relationship to King having been more than professional. I will say, Miller does a good job of keeping both sides of the story moving forward. It would have been easy for the chattier portions to bring things to a halt: that doesn’t happen.

This aspect is certainly helped by a strong performance from Gross, who manages to avoid the obvious tropes of such a situation, and comes over as smart, well-spoken and committed. He’s no Alan Rickman of course; then again, who is? I found myself, if not quite on Gabriel’s side, at least seeing his point of view and his grounds for extreme action. The main problem is a failure to set King up as credible opposition. Before things kick off, there’s no reason to view her as an action heroine: all we see is her being easily beaten by her martial-arts teacher. Then, suddenly, she – or, rather obviously, Naughton’s stunt double – is kicking butt and spraying bullets around like a grizzled Army Ranger.

Okay, Naughton is far better than Anna Nicole Smith, though that’s a low bar for anyone to clear. She does okay with the dramatic side of things, though the script occasionally gives her little to work with. The broken relationship with her spouse feels like another element poorly lifted from Die Hard, and things like her overhearing another judge go full racist were so obvious as to trigger an eye-roll. Miller does have a nice visual eye, e.g. the shot of the attackers marching towards their target was a genuine stand-out, and there’s enough competence to stop it from being actively annoying. However, its script needed more work, and perhaps a better central concept, to succeed in an over-crowded field.

Dir: Wes Miller
Star: Naturi Naughton, Lance Gross, Jason Mitchell, Johnny Messner

Ebony Hustle

★½
“Credit where credit is due…”

When the best part of a movie is the opening credits, we have a problem. That’s the case here, with an 007-influenced montage that feels as if it cost more than the entire rest of the film to put together. However, by that point, the movie was already on thin ice, because the volume of the music was roughly three times that of dialogue in the pre-credit scene. Lunging repeatedly for the button on the remote is always a red flag for any indie movie, and proved accurate here. The same goes for the gratuitous name-checking of much better black heroines, such as Christie Love and Cleopatra Jones. They just draw attention to the deficiencies here – not that they are hard to see.

The unusually named heroine (Lamb) is a former stripper turned insurance fraud investigator, and unwillingly accepts a case to look into the disappearance of 16-year-old girl, Ny’Kia (Elizabeth). She had become part of the retinue of former gangster turned pastor, Caleb Truth (Chandler, who looks like you ordered Snoop Dogg on wish.com). He is supposedly a reformed character, and speaks all his lines in rhyme. This is an affectation which grows steadily more annoying, every time he speaks. It seems it may even have irritated the makers, because that thread – which I’d have thought would have been the main plot – is ended, alongside Truth’s doggerel rapping, with relatively little trouble by Ebony, when there’s still half an hour to go.

The remaining time is largely filled by Ebony’s romantic entanglements. She’s a highly predatory cougar, which seems something of a double standard, considering the way she goes after Caleb Truth, for activities that aren’t really that different. There are also far too many unconvincing FaceTime conversations, though at least these are largely free of the audio issues which infect many of the face-to-face scenes. There is one which does work, between Ebony and former husband, police detective Wayne (Stevenson), both expressing regret over their shared past. Both actors are convincing, and it offers a rare moment of emotion which feels genuine here. It helps it’s understated and quiet, standing in sharp contrast to the shrill yelling and show-boating which permeates just about every other moment.

I can see where the makers were trying to go. It’s just that they managed to ignore all the elements which made black heroines of the seventies so memorable. Here’s a clue, it wasn’t flirty chat-chat with younger men over the telephone. Not to say the likes of Foxy Brown weren’t sexual creatures: it just never felt it was their main raison d’etre. Here, it feels like… well, Ebony may have left the strip-club, but the strip-club never left Ebony. Her crime-fighting trails in, a long way behind and seeming little more then an afterthought. Any time this feels like it might be achieving its ends, something happens – such as Ebony’s boss appearing, an early contender for worst actor of the year – and it all comes crashing back to earth.

Dir: Jamezz Hampton
Star: Michelle l Lamb, Andrew Chandler, Ryan Elizabeth, Joel Stevenson

Vengeance Served Cold

★½
“More like undercooked. “

At the age of fifteen, Madison Michaels saw her prostitute mother beaten and killed by Renegade (Cross), a vicious local pimp. His homicide goes unpunished. Ten years later, Madison (Linton) is a counsellor, trying to help drug addicts and hookers get off the streets. She discovers that Renegade is still abusing women, and gets no help from the police, with Detective Straker (Williams) saying he can do nothing based on her hearsay. Against the advice of her friends and sister Lydia (Jeffries), Madison hatches a plan to take the pimp down, and clean the streets of thus piece of scum. Naturally, it doesn’t initially go quite as planned, with the trap set for Renegade backfiring, followed by betrayal from an unexpected direction. 

Even at seventy-five minutes long, this somehow manages to outstay its welcome in short order. On a shallow level, I eventually understood why Renegade may not have been prosecuted, yet the explanation falls far short of being fully convincing. It is still more than we get, in terms of a reason why Madison waited ten years before deciding to take any action. It’s not like she or Renegade went anywhere. Sure, she’s learning martial arts from her (not particularly awe-inspiring) sensei. Yet the level which she has reached doesn’t seem, for example, to reach any kind of critical threshold, such as the one necessary to take down a sadistic street thug with no moral qualms. In two minutes, I came up with a better plot: Madison went away, joined the army, and is now back, armed with the skills she needs to take on Renegade.

The poverty of the production too often gets in the way. Witness, for example, the penultimate scene, which was clearly filmed on a windy street, resulting in the dialogue being inaudible over the breeze rattling across the mics. Walmart sells a variety of wind covers for microphones at a cost of less than ten dollars. That this was, apparently, beyond the movie’s resources, tells you all you need to know. Similarly, the supposedly “brutal” death of the heroine’s mother consists of not much more than the actress lying on the floor with her eyes open. As a result, this rarely manages to approach a convincing depiction of life on the streets.

Some slight credit is due to Davis for exercising restraint on the soundtrack. It actually feels like it belongs to a proper film, rather than the director’s Spotify on random, as is usually the case in these films. This is not enough to overcome a script that simply does not have enough going on, even at the short duration present. There’s no particular sense of escalation, and what should have been the climactic face-off between Madison and – let’s remember, since the movie seems all but to forget this – the man who killed her mother in front of her, falls flatter than a day-old crepe. To continue the culinary metaphor of the title, I’m sending this one back to the kitchen.

Dir: Shaan Davis
Star: Kameka Linton, Aviator Cross, Chyrod Williams, Brandy Jeffries

Panther of the Border

★½
“A load of panths.”

There are times when I can look at a failure of a movie, and kinda see how the various elements could have been arranged to better effect. That’s the case here, where a poverty-row, Spanish-language (but made in Texas) production about rape, revenge and narcos, could potentially have worked. Except, it absolutely doesn’t. It’s the story of Carla Mendoza (Verastegui), who happens to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, working for her boss, Pedro Camargo (Palomo), blissfully unaware he is a cartel leader. As a result, she’s arrested, and ends up spending seven years in prison, while daughter Nina is taken care by her grandmother.

On getting out, Carla vows to take revenge on everyone she considers responsible, which is not a short list. Beyond Camargo, who tried to have her put away for life, it also includes her previous boss (Soberón), who raped and then fired her; Camargo’s rival, La Cobra (played, according to the IMDb, by “La Cobra de Tamaulipas”, though my Internet sleuthing suggests she’s actually called Caty Gutiérrez); Camargo’s wife, who dissed Carla just before the arrest; and, quite probably, the doctor who doesn’t quite exhibit a top-tier beside manner, after Nina is shot when Camargo tries to take Carla out. Our heroine holds grudges like an elephant with a Rolodex (Kids! Ask your parents!), and has taken lessons in the necessary skills to exact payback from those on her list.

Unfortunately, the execution is terrible. The script is a complete mess, at one point repeating the entire sequence of events leading up to Carla’s arrest, which simply confused the hell out of me. Motivations for most characters are unclear, with things happening for no reason, out of thin air, or not at all, being simply described to us. For instance, Nina mounts an assault on La Cobra’s men, which we only hear about third-hand, through a report given to Camargo. This isn’t surprising, since the production values are woeful, with the “police station” and “hospital” battling it out, for the title of Least Convincing Facility. They’re still not as bad as Carla’s combat skills: my grandmother could do better, and she’s been dead for 40 years.

It feels as if the makers ran out of money or script pages, the film ending with Nina miraculously going from coma to 100% well again, followed by Verastegui giving a rousing karaoke rendition of the film’s theme song in a nightclub, before a crowd charitably numbering in double-digits. Even by the low standards of the Mexploitation films we’ve seen previously, this is bad. Yet as mentioned, arranged differently… I actually liked La Cobra, who genuinely acts like I feel a cartel leader would. If the whole film had been her against Carla, for some reason, it would have been on considerably stronger ground. Indeed, the performances in general are okay: most would not feel out of place in my narconovelas. Every other element though, ranges from poor to flat-out terrible.

Dir: Martin Palomo, Luis Antonio Rodriguez
Star: Carla Verastegui, Martin Palomo, La Cobra de Tamaulipas, Héctor Soberón
a.k.a. La Pantera de la Frontera

Gangsta Grrlz

★★
“Some things never change…”

Not to be confused with the clearly different Gangster Girls, which isn’t particularly gangster at all, or Gangsta Girls, which is Vietnamese, and especially not to be confused with the execrable Girls vs. Gangsters. Though confusion is understandable, and not helped by Tubi typoing the title to the slightly more correct spelling of Gangsta Girlz, and adding an unrelated poster. So, we all sorted on that? At first, I thought this was a remarkably accurate period piece, starting proceedings off in 1998 Philadelphia, an era of large wigs and even larger mobile phones. I kept expecting it to jump forward to the present day: never happened, and that’s because it turns out, this was actually made in 1998. All the retro trappings were actually of the time.

This does include nineties video quality, and audio that leaves room for improvement in some scenes. However, I’ve endured worse in both departments. It tells the story of Ninea Ranks (Smith), whose boyfriend brought her along on a drug deal that goes wrong, leading to her shooting a man. He takes responsibility, dies in prison, and she decides to embrace a life of crime. This is all explained in voice-over, presumably for budget purposes, and she now has an all-female organization, because she doesn’t trust men. That includes lieutenant T (Gaston), and new recruit Glitter (Jones). There’s a beef with rival leader Dion (King), who would like nothing better than to see Ninea behind bars and unable to compete. However, he faces dissension from within his own ranks, by a disgruntled henchman, Razor.

What stands out is probably how little the genre has changed in the 25 years since this came out. This offers much the same mix of unconvincing drama, guns held sideways and relentless hip-hop by the director’s pals, as any of the more recent entries in the modern Blaxploitation field. There’s no surprises at all to be found as things develop, unless you consider the abrupt conclusion, with a caption which succinctly informs the viewer, “Ninea left town to lay low in 1999. But don’t get too comfortable fellas… She’ll be back.” A quarter of a century later, we’re still waiting, and I’m beginning to wonder if we might have been ghosted by her.

The only scene which stands out is Razor chatting to his loyal friend, Curtis, about being fed-up of Dion’s leadership, and deciding to betray their boss. It’s shot and staged simply, and feels all the more authentic for it. Otherwise, what I’ll remember most is likely the spectacular selection of wigs owned by Ninea, whose last name really should have been “Business” [I’ll wait… Forever, if necessary] Characters and plot threads drift in and out without achieving even the caption level of resolution offered to the anti-heroine, such as the police officers who show up for a couple of meaningless scenes. While the performances aren’t bad, they deserve to be in the service of a script which offers the actors considerably more.

Dir: Randy Williams
Star: Keya Smith, Tamura Gaston, Tyrone King, Dawn Jones

Family Blood

★½
“Bloody hell.”

Tubi TV has become a goldmine of obscure, weird and, very occasionally, wonderful content for me. When I say “obscure”, I mean their selection includes films like this, about which the IMDb has only the barest of information. No external reviews; no user reviews; not even a rating. The film exists, and at the time of writing, nobody on the Internet has apparently noticed. To be honest, there is  good reason for this: it’s another one of those modern blaxploitation vehicles, which seem to exist mostly for the director’s pals to show up on the soundtrack. Yet even by the low standards of that genre, this is technically inept, with woefully shoddy audio and almost no storyline to speak of.

What there is, occurs ten years after the event – not that you’d know it, if it wasn’t for a caption saying “TEN YEARS EARLIER”.  Det. Lens Smith (Stagger) tells the story of his ultimately unsuccessful efforts to locate a group of women assassins, operating at the time in Las Vegas. There was Dawn (Jaye), Phoenix (Cantrell)… and it then appears the group ran out of proper names, with the others being called Red Death (Douglas), White Tiger and – I kid you not – Yellow Fever. I have to repeat, there’s really no plot here. One of them is married to another LVPD detective. There’s some light bickering among the women. At the end, Det. Smith gets up and walks away, vowing to re-open the case. That’s it. 

Pluses are hard to find. It’s barely an hour long: that’s one. Initially, I thought it might eschew the usual crap rap, with the first murder accompanied by electro-Celtic bagpiping, which was at least different. This didn’t last long, unfortunately. There are occasional moments of droll humour, referencing the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon franchises, and one victim gets an extra bullet, for having had the temerity to touch his assassin’s ass. Though most of the killings are uninteresting or even unintentionally laughable. What assassin worth their salt, would climb to the roof of a building to try and shoot their victim on the sidewalk with a silenced handgun? I know nothing about guns and still realize that’s flat-out stupid.

As is sadly common, the audio is about the worst aspect. The talking head interview of Det. Smith is the only time where this is acceptable. Anything outside is doomed to be muffled; anything inside is equally inevitably afflicted with a tinny echo. I had to keep my finger permanently hovering over the volume button, turning it up whenever anyone was speaking, knowing that at any second the crap rap would burst out and send my ear-drums to Bleeding Town. In the end, I enabled the closed captions instead. Problem solved. The women are reasonably attractive, and keep their clothes on, with nothing more than a bit of cleavage to show for your troubles. It’s all, very definitely, not one of Tubi’s finest moments.

Dir: Bowfinger Stagger
Star: Kevin Stagger, Marlo Jaye, Porsha Cantrell, Ta’Sha Douglas

Divided We Fall

★½
“Failed to sustain my undivided attention”

We begin with the usual disclaimer for films of this kind: middle-aged white guys like me are not the target audience. However, I think it’s fair to say that concepts like story-telling and character development are not limited to any particular race, colour or creed, so I still feel equipped to offer an opinion on these aspects. Though, actually, what felt like it worked best here was its strong sense of place. I’ve never been to the projects in Jamaica, New York (though Chris grew up elsewhere in the same borough of Queens). But the film does a good job of showing you that environment; it certainly works better than the (largely token) efforts to convince you some scenes take place in Miami, or even Moscow.

I guess loosely, it’s the story of Keisha (Diamond) and her all-female gang, whose robberies and other action kick of an escalating series of retribution and other incidents. For it turns out the target of the robbery was a front for the Russian mafia, who are none too happy about being on the receiving end of criminal activity themselves. They send a team of enforcers over to find the culprits and wreak retribution. Meanwhile, Sha (Brown), the local boss of drugs and other illicit things, gets summoned to Miami and made an offer he can’t refuse. Finally, the feds are sniffing around, drawn by all the carnage, and to make matters worse, turns out the boyfriend of one of Keisha’s crew is in the FBI.

There is a lot going on here: to be frank, far too much. It runs 107 minutes, yet would probably need at least twice that length to do justice to all of the threads (and the above is by no means an exhaustive list). I tried my hardest to keep track of exactly who was doing what to whom, and why. But the Russians were about the only ones who seemed to have a clear motive and acted towards it. We also come in with the story feeling like it’s already in progress, and Keisha spends half an hour or so introducing us in voice-over to the various players, making her own character and aspirations feel very much like an afterthought, when they eventually turn up.

It is really the brutally obscure plotting which sinks this. The camerawork is occasionally impressive, and compared to other entries in the genre I’ve seen, the production values are mostly decent – the courtroom scene looked like a proper courtroom, though some of the FBI offices did feel rather… residential, shall we say! The ending isn’t even a proper ending, just a vague cliffhanger where the Russians head to Miami. I’ll confess to having drifted off about 70 minutes in, but like a good, conscientious reviewer, I rewound the movie (well, the digital equivalent of “rewound”!) and watched the rest again. The sad thing is, it didn’t make very much more sense when I was fully awake.

Dir: Jamal Doctor
Star: Yellow Diamond, Pritti Militant, Levar Hosten, Shamel Brown

District Queens

★★
“Queen of the East.”

The latest stop in our ongoing tour of female-driven urban crime movies brings us to the nation’s capital in Washington, where the police are celebrating just having taken down a leading light in the city’s organized crime industry. Now, they set their sights on a new target: the gang led by Racine Robinson (Vaughan) and her two daughters, Kat (Crosby) and Candy (Bethea). These might prove a tougher nut to crack, since the Robinson crew have a harsh, zero tolerance policy to anyone who messes with them in the slightest, yet also gathered local support during the coronavirus pandemic. Indeed, Racine is so popular in the neighbourhood, a run for political office is not out of the question. However, she has rivals, who have more than a passing interest in seeing her taken out of the picture – albeit for very different reasons, in order to make room for them to rise up.

This is a real grab-bag of elements, ranging from those which work very well, to those which are almost unmitigated disasters. To start on the positive side, there’s a callous disregard for human life here that’s genuinely disturbing. Even if the CGI splatter is far from convincing, head shots abound. And unlike some entries, the women in this one have no issue getting their hands dirty, for even the most trivial of reasons e.g someone tossed water at them. The guns they tote on the cover aren’t just for show. There are plenty of strong female characters on both sides of the law, from the Robinson family through Police Commissioner Stallworth, to dirty cops who have no issue shooting someone in cold blood and planting a gun on them. Perhaps the most impressive is Jada (Simmons), who looks like she actually would pop a cap in you for looking at her the wrong way. Even if there are points where I wondered if I was watching a black Russ Meyer movie, there are worse things as influence.

These good points are, unfortunately, outweighed heavily by the other side of the scale. Some of them are par for the course, such as the way the movie appears a vehicle for the makers to tout their pals’ music, businesses or whatever, in a painfully obvious way. The shaky technical elements are also unsurprising, with a “police station” that is little more than empty rooms. Audio is, as usual, the main culprit: there are points where two sides of the supposed same conversation will sound radically different. The main problem though, is a script which has no idea of the direction it wants to take, once it has set out its pieces on the chess-board. Scenes happen, with little or no connection to each other, and supporting characters drift in, drift out or (more often) get gunned down, without ever establishing relevance. Throw in embarrassingly amateur lesbian canoodling, without delivering any actual nudity, and you have a film which swings wildly from “That’s actually well-done” to “How could they include this without cringing?” every couple of minutes.

Dir: Roosevelt Jackson
Star: Rochelle Vaughan, Kathleen Vaughn Crosby, Stacie Bethea, Sasheen Simmons