Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Sinners’ on VOD, a Hapless Horror Movie About Christian Girls Gone Bad

Now on VOD, The Sinners will try to elbow its way into a crowded horror field this weekend and, hey, good luck with that, because so many movies like this are like $6.99 to rent but ultimately valued at a dime a dozen. Granted, this one — alternately titled The Color Rose — stirs in a couple different genres, being about a group of Christian-school don’t-call-them-mean girls (even though they’re absolutely mean) who indulge in the type of base impulses that could get their behinds expelled into the cold, godless (gulp) secular world, where murderous killers lurk, because there’s no way one such monster could infiltrate an insular little god-fearing community of humble praying folk, right? NO WAY.

THE SINNERS: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: Aubrey (Brenna Llewellyn) kneels in the grass like a good pious girl. We hear her voice: “My name is Aubrey Miller (pause for dramatic effect) and this is how my body ended up at the bottom of a lake.” Oh boy, a ghost voiceover! SHE’S DEAD, AND YET SHE SPEAKS. Here’s Aubrey’s story, sort of, except it’s also Grace Carver’s (Kaitlyn Bernard) story, because she’s not dead. At least not yet. Neither is Aubrey, because everything from her v/o from the great beyond is a flashback. In this small woodsy unnamed town of about 38 cast members, Jesus and his pops are the omnipresent invisible residents. Grace goes to a school where schoolgirl uniforms are strictly enforced and crucifixes are nailed to the walls, and it seems like a Mel Gibsony nutso Catholic thing until we learn her dad, Dean (Tahmoh Penikett), is the local pastor, so there must be some other rigid puritanical fundamentalist denomination happening here. Does it matter? Not really, but let’s just say Pastor Dean could battle the dad from The Witch for the heavyweight crown of thorns in the Patriarchal Piety Olympics.

Pastor Dean is not at all thrilled that his daughter is part of a mean-girl group at school dubbed the Sins, and yes, that’s as in “seven deadly.” Grace is Lust, and for that, Daddy Pastor Dean buttons the top button of his pure-white button-up collared shirt extra tight. She just dumped her BF — who her family calls a “worldly boy,” insert 300 gasps here — because she’s a secret lesbian — 400 gasps! — smooching one of the other Sins, Tori (Brenna Coates), a.k.a. Wrath. Maybe they’re just rebellious teens acting out because their schooling seems to consist of the following:

1st hour — Bible
2nd hour — More Bible
3rd hour — Praisin’ the Lord
**break for Bible lunch
4th hour — Studies in Constancy
5th hour — Hey, Stop Being Horny Back There
**snack: highly symbolic apples
6th hour — Anti-wickedness
7th hour — More Bible (reprise)
Extracurricular activity — Cheerleading for Jehovah

Aubrey is one of the sins, Pride, because she’s absolutely the piousest of them all. She’s the reason Pastor Dean knows about the Sins club — she confessed it to him and he obviously didn’t give a rip about keeping it in confidence, resulting in quite the row at the Carver dinner table that night, punctuated with Grace exclaiming, “Fine, I’ll just be a good little lamb and follow blindly in the path of the lord! BAAAA-AAA-AA-AA-AAA!” And lo, did Pastor Dean clench his orifices with the fury of the Holy Spirit.

So what happens when a member of an avaricious clique turns rat? Punishment, of course. The girlz invite Aubrey up to Grace’s attic for Bible study, but it’s bait-and-switch: they gather in a Luciferian liturgical circle with lots of candles and pentagrams that remain un-inverted because they obviously don’t know diddly-squat about what Satan demands. Nevertheless, Aubrey is TRAUMATIZED. But not as traumatized as she is when the girlz don creepy animal masks, tie her up, toss her in the trunk and take her to the woods to rough her up. Aubrey escapes, but is never seen again. The girls are sweating it. They didn’t smite her, swear to gawd. The cops question them. The town’s 38 cast members are all out of sorts. And then the Sins walk into class and someone has carved the seven deadly sins on a desk — and Pride is scratched out. To quote a passage from Bay, BB:2, shit just got real.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: The Sinners is The Craft meets Se7en meets Mean Girls under the umbrella of a generic dead teenager flick.

Performance Worth Watching: This is far too generous a category for this film. I’d say the cast is handcuffed by the cloddy script, but that doesn’t take into account its foot shackles and chastity belt.

Memorable Dialogue: Tori and Grace are dealing with the anxiety of their friends’ disappearances.

Tori: You’re a real puker, huh?

Grace: I puke when I’m stressed.

Sex and Skin: NONE. I’m as shocked as you are.

Our Take: So are we supposed to take The Sinners seriously, or is it being played for laughs? Who knows. It tumbles into the chasm between tones, never to be seen again. And that’s probably just fine, because the movie is already a collection of cliches left over from too many movies before it — remedial slasher-flick tropes, the mean girls’ slo-mo badder-than-U strut through school, the pastor’s daughter tarting herself up with heels and push-up bra, displays of exquisite teen corpses, dingbat declarations of great obviousness like “Ladies, it’s time we take our sins to the next level!”, Satanic Panic overtures, freaky dream sequences, etc. I yawn in its general direction 666 times.

Perhaps — and I float this out there as an act of great generosity — it intends to be a criticism of dogmatic and repressive patriarchal religion. The Pastor Dad is a His-way-or-the-highway type, and Chloe’s older teen brother is a chip off the old male-dictatorial block. If this is indeed the film’s thematic goal, it never achieves ascension. I harbor no affinity whatsoever for private parochial education, but I have to say the movie’s portrayal of a Christian school is a moronic parody that isn’t even amusingly blasphemous. It’s just stereotype city. The Carver family is so over the top in its sectarian posturing, it makes The Witch family look like Anton LaVey’s coffee klatch.

Also, are we supposed to care about the seven Sin girls and Grace’s mom and dad and brother and sister (and I think there’s a baby too?) and the school teacher and principal and the local sheriff and his wife who are trying to have a baby and the deputy and the two cops from “the big city” who show up to treat the sheriff like a hayseed and the local guy who sells flowers out of an Airstream trailer and his hippie girlfriend who’s the object of nose-wrinkling because she likes to — GASP — walk around barefoot like a total heathen? This thing is just STUFFED with pointless characters who eat up run time so the threadbare plot can meander from one poorly lit scene to the next, many of them buffered by downbeat pop songs mournfully moaned by a sub-par Lana Del Rey clone. This would all be acceptable if it scratched horror dilettantes’ itches with some innovative slaughter, but the kills are just tossed in thoughtlessly with minimal dramatic impact; besides, they’d just get in the way of the discussions about the sheriff’s fertility, because there’s nothing we give a bigger rip about than the guy’s “swimmers.” The only thing that really gets killed here is our interest.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Forgive me father for I’m about to commit the sin of wrath: This movie sucks.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Where to stream The Sinners