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Tim Connolly is the prototypical man-child: at an impressionable age he was witness to violent sexual acts between his parents and their friends. Flash forward many years later, and Tim is still that same psychologically damaged little boy, but now in a man’s body. His father is dead from AIDS, and his mother is a histrionic bible freak who regularly humiliates and debases her son, ostensibly to “purify” him and remove him from the devil’s influence. These procedures include micro-managing his whereabouts, bare-ass spanking him when she is in a good mood, beating the fuck out of him (no pun intended) with a broom-handle when she’s really pissed, and even keeping his bowel movements under her thumb. There is a scene where she force-feeds him Milk Of Magnesia and locks him in the head until he drops a deuce – if you’ll permit me a moment’s indulgence, I’d like to examine that symbolism real quick: Milk of Magnesia = MOM. With me on that? And then we have Tim standing there in his underwear, mouthful of viscous white liquid dribbling down his chin. Okay? Okay. Just wanted you to know what you are dealing with here.
 | When Tim gets to work, things aren’t that much better. Sure, he has seniority, but no respect from the co-workers underneath him. They either ignore him or outright belittle him, adding to his feelings of powerlessness and helplessness. There is nary a whiff of subtlety in this film: Tim is purposefully a character that embodies every dismal feeling the audience has ever had. He taps straight into any vestige of low-self esteem you’ve ever felt, plumbs the depths of your terrible memories of being an ungainly teenager, awkward and unaware of your own limbs, and brings them painfully to the fore. So when the new girl starts, and she is sort of pretty and looks a little awkward herself, you won’t be able to help cringing as Tim has utterly no capacity to relate to her in any social way. In fact, he bumbles around her like a three-year old, and doesn’t even know enough to let her walk through a door first. |
Given all that, is it difficult to understand why Tim hires prostitutes, has them go down on him, and then, right as he reaches the magic moment, grabs their heads and literally chokes them on his dick? Well, actually it is, but that’s what he does. We see the first emergence of the split in his personality, the brutality he sees in the sex act, the only way he feels he can have power over another person. But like any good serial killer, escalations are bound to happen. Soon merely death is not enough. He needs souvenirs. His mother makes him massage her feet, how does Tim deal with that? Simple: cuts a whore’s big toe off. The girls at work call him Creepy Tim, and insinuate that he is the Prostitute Killer and the author of the horrendously misspelled Zodiac Killer-type letters sent to the local paper? Well, I will let you watch what he does about that. *shudder* | But the last straw comes when the new girl, Louise, takes up with one of Tim’s most hated aggressors at work, Andrew. The idea is simply unconscionable to Tim, and propels him to cross the final line and descend into proper madness, which ends up leading to, amongst other things, what is apparently the longest murder scene of a child under 11 in film history. It also leads to the finale of the film, and a scene that will shock the hell out of you, now matter how hardened you are to genre fare. I say this from experience, because it happened to me, and I watch a lot of odious movies. |  |
And that, my friends, is the gist of Us Sinners, a brutal, brutal movie. For instance, there are more onscreen murders than there are speaking roles in the film. This is a movie that would have been perfectly at home in the grindhouse theaters in the 70’s. The closest approximation of it that I can give to you is to call it a hybrid of Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer and May. It even contains a scene that garners it the distinction of being labeled pornography. That is what I call a horror movie! This gets the Zombie Boy seal of approval, and that is no small thing. My shelf is full of indie efforts that don’t.  | Let’s examine some of the reasons why this movie passes where others fail: for one thing, it is not a quick attempt to capitalize on horror’s appeal to a younger demographic with disposable cash. The script was written, and rewritten, and rewritten until it made sense, both narratively and budgetarily. Then the casting process began, and many people were seen until a cast was set based on talent, not on availability. Same with the crew. Snow was a perfectionist on the project, taking 5-months to shoot it and occasionally pissing off his actors, but he knew what he wanted to do, and I applaud his. Then came the editing, and screening for friends, and then editing some more. Eventually he ended up with a striking film, in terms of the fearless performances from his cast and the distinctive look to the cinematography. I particularly enjoyed the use of the red and green lightning gels, and the decision to tell much of the story in close-ups. It makes the action that much more uncomfortably intimate. Most DIY films of this nature end up either too dark to be comprehensible or bleached white when shooting outdoor scenes, but Us Sinners avoids both of those pitfalls. Though sometimes you’ll wish it was too dark. |
It also helps that in addition to his decade’s worth of theater experience, Snow is a musician, with four albums under his belt with his band Frances Farmer My Hero (including an excellent ode to the aforementioned May). So the music in the film is well-placed and effective, something, when done right, you don’t register consciously. It comes across more in the way your mind perceives the action: it makes scenes that might seem hammy otherwise ominous instead. And, of course, all of the music was written by Mr. Snow. Now, all that glitters is not gold, and I don’t want you to get the impression that I am just blowing a load onto George’s face for the sake of it. The movie does have some of the inherent problems that you might expect from a micro-budget feature with a first-time director. While almost all extraneous material was pared away during the extensive edits, some of the windshield POVs drag a bit, and some of the cuts (especially in the prologue scene) are a little choppy. And of course you have to understand that while most of the performances are quite good for this type of film, not every single actor is Oscar-caliber. The voiceover work as well sometimes adds unintentional comedy to proceedings. But hey, not everyone can afford expensive professional ADR sessions. | The end result, for those who only read the first and last paragraphs, is a low-budget horror film that sticks its head high above the others around it. It takes no shit, and will confront your expectations whenever possible. When you’re tired of the mainstream color-by-numbers bullshit studio fare, and decide to take on some underground celluloid that will excite you and get your neurons firing, the blood and semen of Us Sinners is a great place to start. And to the indie genere stalwarts, here is one that will make you remember why you love to troll the internet and flea markets for the movies no one else has seen, but should. |  |
Bon apetit! As of yet, Us Sinners is not available for purchase commercially, but luckily there is a really great looking website right over here Us Sinners.
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Second to last sentence says "... now matter how hardened you are
