Tag: urban

Birth of a Savage

  By

★★
“Not really very savage at all”

This is one of those films where the same person wrote, directed and starred in it, and once again, the results illustrate the problems with such an endeavour. Almost any project will benefit from an external perspective which can offer constructive criticism, but when this is removed, the flaws typically end up multiplied. That said, this isn’t terrible. I think Riches the screenwriter comes out best, with a story which bypasses the usual cliches of urban storylines e.g. gangster rising out of the gutter, and does offer some genuine surprises. Director Riches also gets some points for restraint on the soundtrack front; it’s not comprised entirely of her mates rapping badly. 

It’s as an actress that Riches is weakest. The story has her playing Tiana, a woman whose entirely life has been dogged by poor relationships with men, from a distant father through bad boyfriends, to a controlling and eventually abusive husband, who kicks her and young daughter Erica (Session) out on the street. The only thing keeping Tiana sane is the classes she gives at the local martial arts school, owned by Mr. Lewis (Hoo), and she decided to use these skills to make bad men pay for their behaviour. This comes close to home, because she suspects that her sister, Rochelle (Amor), is also in an abusive relationship. These suspicions prove well-founded, though in one of those genuine surprises, not quite as Tiana believes.

The problem is that Tiana is never even slightly convincing as a bad-ass. Her idea of martial-arts training is, I kid you not, jumping jacks, and most of the fights we see are poorly-staged and/or brief, I suspect out of necessity. It’s the kind of film which needs to go a lot harder than the lead actress is capable of. “Concerned mother” is within her acting range; “angel of vengeance” is not. I did appreciate how the script does not attempt to go #AllMen on us, with a couple of sympathetic male characters. Mr. Lewis is probably the most well-developed, though he does fall right into the wheel-house of the “wise Oriental spouting philosophical insights” trope instead. But he does deliver some unexpected truths.

The structure is either clunky or interesting, and I’m not sure which. It begins with her abducting one of her targets, then leaps back decades to tell Tiana’s story from the very beginning. I’m not certain anything useful is gained by this, and by the time it circles back, we’ve largely forgotten why we are supposed to care. The final act is the best in most departments, including Riches apparently doing one actual stunt which genuinely surprised me, and proceedings that capture a down-to-earth tone, missing in dumb plot threads like Mr. Lewis giving the dojo to Tiana. To be brutally honest, I’d not blame the viewer if they’d bailed by that point, having decided Riches needs to focus her talents on one area.

Dir: Jezar Riches
Star: Jezar Riches, Howard Hoo, Cheri Amor, Dalaini Session

 

The Bag Girls 2

  By

★★½
“Not so bag.”

Back when I reviewed The Bag Girls, I was not particularly impressed and spent a fair bit of time riffing off the lead actresses’s names, which says a lot about how forgettable the film was. I expected more of the same here, but especially toward the end, there was some indication of genuine progress. While we’re still not talking great, there were positives, which deserve to be acknowledged. You likely do need to have seen the original, as this assumes you know who the characters are: Dee (The Doll) , Nola (The Boss) and the rest of the quartet are still robbing for a living, sporting bejewelled masks, and referring to each other by high-end handbag names. However, trouble hits when a strong-box they loot turns out to belong to Colombian cartel queen, Solera Castillo (Garcia), who is not happy with this apparent disrespect. Meanwhile, the authorities, particularly in the form of Detective Lewis (Wilson), are also on the trail of the Bag Girls.

It’s a reasonable enough plot, and when the film sticks to this, it’s quite watchable. Women take the lead on the three corners of the story-line’s triangle, anchored by decent performances from those involved. It all ends up in the Bag Girls taking the fight to Castillo’s mansion, after she has begun extracting her own vengeance, while Lewis awaits the arrival of backup. I can’t complain about the imagery of Solera, rising out of her hot-tub to spray automatic gunfire at her attackers, wearing an expression Harley Quinn would likely deem excessively enthusiastic. Though she and the Bag Girls really need to focus on their accuracy, possessing skills that would get them kicked out of Imperial Stormtrooper school. However, the film’s reliance on digital muzzle flashes and CGI blood (if at all), resulting in no property damage is disappointing, though likely inevitable given the budget here still is on the low end.

The problem is the film takes way too long to get to the good stuff, diverting en route to far less interesting subplots and side-stories. There’s an entire separate robbery of some rapper’s party, that is neither necessary to the plot, nor staged in ways that are even slightly interesting. I must also say, the music in large part feels remarkably bland; while I’ve criticized this kind of film before for an excessive reliance on obvious music, this does need something with a harder edge to fit the tone. I do also suspect that, if the events at the end unfolded in real life, a Latin drug cartel would be unlikely to allow the perpetrators to skip away to enjoy drinks on a Mexican beach. Maybe I’ve just seen too many episodes of Ozark. Though this is not about “real life” in the slightest, more a glammed-up version of the gangster lifestyle. If still lacking the resources to sell that dream, everyone involved seems to have made progress from last time, and if not eagerly anticipating Bag Girls 3, I’m not dreading it.

Dir: Wil Lewis
Star: Crystal The Doll, LA Love The Boss, Jenicia Garcia, Chevonne Wilson

Kiss of Death

  By

★★½
“Issues of trust”

The relationship between Mykah (Leason) and Jameson (Chandler) is quickly heading for the rocks, as the honesty between them has evaporated. He suspects her of lying to him and having an affair: and he’s half-right. For Mykah is misleading him about the reason for her odd hours, though it is work-related as she claims. It’s just that her job is as an assassin, who kills the husbands of battered women, assisted by family friend Lady (Frazier). After successfully offing a prospective politician, Mykah’s next job is Dyson (Jackson), after his wife Chantelle tearfully tells her story of abuse, and offers to pay half a million dollars for a job well done. 

Mykah is initially not keen on accepting the offer, partly because she’s trying to fix her marriage, partly because Dyson is a notorious crime boss. But it turns out Chantelle has incriminating footage of Mykah’s last hit, giving the assassin no option. As she gets closer to her target, things begin to get murkier. Dyson reveals he knows about Mykah’s early family life, which ended when her parents died in a murder-suicide. Or was that actually what happened? In addition, are Chantelle’s motives justice and escape, or are they considerably more mercenary? And will Mykah be able to get to the bottom of all this before Jameson stumbles to the entirely wrong conclusion and crashes the situation? It’s a lot of questions, and I did like the script here, which manages to keep a complex story clear.

However, it is fair to say that it does take way too long to get to the interesting stuff, with the first half being populated largely be banal chit-chat between Mykah and either Jameson or Dyson. Throw in a teenage daughter, and the soap-opera elements are in danger of toppling this over before it can get going. There’s definitely a shortage of action, between the opening murder and the final confronatation when the truth gets revealed. Virtually all we get is a brief fight between Mykah and a pair of Dyson’s minions, after he begins to suspects she is not what she seems to be. It’s okay: I liked Mykah pausing to remove her heels before going into battle. It just needs more.

Director Sesma has a fairly long track record of low-budget action, and technically it’s competent enough. That’s particularly true, when compared so some of the other urban genre entries we’ve seen here, and at least he avoids the obvious cliches of drugs and gangs. But if you compare this to, say, the Thai TV movies we’re previously reviewed, such as The Secret Weapon, also about an assassin, the gap in energy and action becomes inescapable. Perhaps it’s a budgetary thing. If this had not apparently been so reliant on the mantra that “talk is cheap,” then it could have been more than just an acceptable time-passer overall, with only the last third measuring up to scratch.

Dir: Christian Sesma
Star: Sheila Leason, Kevin Blake Chandler, Dontelle Jackson, Cheryl Frazier

Ebony Hustle 2: Ballistic Protection

  By

★★
“A slight improvement.”

There are times when I end up asking myself deep philosophical questions, like “Why am I doing this?” or “Isn’t there something else on which I can use my time?” In this case it, was “Who thought a sequel to the painful exercise which was Ebony Hustle was necessary?” To be fair though, this is an improvement. A half-star might be pushing it, to the point I did wonder about introducing a ★¾ rating. Or possibly a ★ and 11/16. It’s not good, to be clear. But it’s definitely less aggressively incompetent, with some of the most annoying rough edges smoothed down. For example, the audio this time mostly (although not entirely) lives around the same level, and there’s only one Facetime scene.

We are once more in the world of Ebony Howard (Lamb), a private eye who still doesn’t appear to be much private eye-ing. Of the three strands in this story, just one involves paying work, Ebony seeking to serve papers on a baby daddy to compel him to take a paternity test. There is also her investigation into the unexplained disappearance of Onyx, a friend from her strip-club days. This gets kicked up after she discovers Onyx’s phone with a video on it. Just do not expect closure for this thread, because the film ends in a way suggesting it will be a key element of Ebony Hustle 3: This Time We’re Semi-Competent, no doubt coming soon to a low-rent streaming service near you.

The bulk of it is, again, Ebony’ relationship drama. In this case, it’s with Mac (Howard), a promising basketball prospect who is being pressured to take performance-enhancing drugs by his manager, Bryan Calvin (Polo). This makes him become highly irritable, and causes Ebony so start digging into what’s going on, and Calvin does not take kindly to this interference with his meal ticket. With the help of her former strip-club boss, who is now a health guru, Ebony finds out the truth about what Mac is taking, and confronts Calvin. This is likely the only scene in which the film’s subtitle comes close to being relevant, as it’s the only time where the heroine wields a gun, or even gets physical.

The movie does a reasonably good job of managing the story, though the Onyx plot-line is largely ignored in the second half, until a late text message for sequel purposes. Lamb and Howard are not painful to watch, the latter being quite credible as a baller (though I notice the gender-neutral league he’s trying out for doesn’t appear to extend its equality to white women…). But there are way too many false steps, such as the lengthy scene which feels more like a presentation for a health supplement MLM, and the film remains in desperate need of more action and less dialogue.  At least you can now probably see Foxy Brown from here, though you remain in need of a telescope for that.

Dir: John Wayne S. III
Star: Michelle l Lamb, Jessica Mitchell, Jahaziel Howard, Polo

Bang Bang Betty

  By

★★½
“Why not Kill-shot Kiara?”

If I was feeling mean, I’d have tagged this as “Pretty shitty Bang Bang”. But while undoubtedly amusing, that wouldn’t be 100% fair. For in the field of low-budget urban action heroines, this is actually better than most. Now, by broader standards, that’s still not exactly great. However, I’ve seen enough of the genre to appreciate and welcome mere technical proficiency. Simply by having decent audio, I was already impressed. It’s the story of Kiara Sommers (Nunno-Brown), a former soldier who is now a prosecuting attorney. During a meet with one of her informants, she is shot and left for dead, but rescued by another veteran, Ray Smith (Parrish) and nursed back to health. [I’ve vague memories of a Chow Yun-Fat film with this plot]

She’s then able to take revenge on the man responsible, local crime-lord Darnell (Walzer). Which is a bit awkward, because he is her boyfriend. There’s also Valerie Mendez (Hernandez), who used to be a colleague of Kiara in the army, and is now walking a dangerous line, playing for both sides, as a cop and an inside woman for Darnell. It feels as if considerably more thought has gone into this than many in this field, whose plot could typically be written on the back of a beer-mat, and leave room for your pint. Some other elements also deserve praise, such as a soundtrack which isn’t just the director’s rapper mates on shuffle (though there is still a fair bit of that).

While Nunoo-Brown and Hernandez are decent enough in their roles, there are several elements that manage to stop this reaching three stars, which would be close to an all-time high for the genre. There’s a serious question over Kiara’s complete ignorance of her boyfriend being a organized crime boss. I mean, really? Some of the supporting cast are not very good: Walzer in particular struggles with his delivery. There’s also a point where a significant character is killed in front of another. It should have a devastating impact, yet their lack of reaction is notable. A few minutes later in the film, they’re cracking wise with Kiara and Valerie. The bruising on Valerie’s face is a continuity disaster. 

My biggest issue, however, was the bad CGI. The muzzle flashes were marginally acceptable, but the explosions are poor, and the CGI blood close to the worst I’ve ever seen. Having no blood at all would have been a vast improvement. It’s a particular shame, as some of the hand-to-hand action is decent enough (again, compared to what I’ve seen previously), with both lead actresses occasionally impressing. I did laugh when Valerie attempted a lucha libre throw on Darnell’s henchman, only to be tossed aside, and told “That superhero shit doesn’t work in real life, does it?” More of this degree of self-awareness might have been welcome, yet it’s probably wise not to ask for too much. I’ll settle for competence, and there’s just enough here to leave me mildly interested in the sequel, already in post-production: Bang Bang Betty – Valerie’s Revenge.

Dir: Alexander T. Hwang
Star: Kakra Nunoo-Brown, Gerald Parrish, Emily Rose Hernandez, Marc Anthony Walzer

Dope Girls

  By

★★
“Welcome to the dope show.”

This shouldn’t be confused with the BBC series of the same name announced last year. This is very definitely American, another in the ongoing series of urban crime movies which seem to pop up, with some regularity on the likes of Tubi. I keep watching them, in the hope they’ll be good, but am usually disappointed, mostly due to cheap-jack production values and repetitive story-lines. This is at least watchable in the former department, though is definitely marked down for a startlingly abrupt “To be continued” ending. I hate cliff-hangers in books: they do not work any better on movies, and this isn’t exactly Dune Part One, shall we say. Not least because it runs only 75 minutes, including end-credits.

It’s the story of Dee (Pinckney), who comes out of jail with a grudge, and sets about trying to take over the drug trade in the city where she lives (I think it’s Philadelphia). The first obstacle standing in her way is CJ (Whitehurst); after she succeeds in facing him down, he hires an assassin to take her out. But the assassin is not a fan of CJ’s, so looks to switch sides and play for Dee. In her corner, she also has her cousin, Stephanie (Hicks), and a select group of other women with appropriate skills. The one of most note is Stasha Fields, also known as Star (Feindt), a dirty cop who is looking to make it on her own terms.

These make for an interesting set of characters. The film’s main problem is not doing nearly enough with them. Considering how short this runs, there is an awful lot of sitting around, talking about doing things, and not nearly enough actual doing of these things. Outside of the opening scene, in which Dee goes to confront CJ in his apartment, I’m hard-pushed to think of more than a couple of other significant moments of action. Although someone does get shot towards the end, it’s in a non-lethal manner, which is something of a surprise in this genre, since it usually can be depended on for a significant body-count. Here: not so much. There’s even preciously little dealing of the dope.

You’re therefore left largely to rely on the drama for interest, and that’s a bit of a mixed bag. As mentioned, there does seem to have been some thought put into the personnel. Pinckney and Feindt at least can reach convincing on some occasions, while director Deniro – and I’m wagering that is probably not his real name – knows the value of silence, rather than burying every scene in rap music, another staple of the field. In the end though, we reach the closing caption, without having moved an adequate distance from where we were after the first scene. We know a lot more people, to be sure. But to what extent do we know them? Maybe we’ll find out in Dope Girls 2. Maybe I can be bothered to watch it.

Dir: Black Deniro
Star: Kenisha Pinckney, Eva Lin Feindt, Joaquin Whitehurst, Taria Hicks

Jack Squad 2: The Next Generation

  By

★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

  By

★★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

  By

★★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

  By

★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