[Roderick Usher]

I saw this review on Fatally yours ( http://www.fatally-yours.com/horror-...-sinners-2008/) and it made me chuckle.

Review by Dr. Royce Clemens

The first ten minutes of Us Sinners contains two blowjobs (both of which are ineptly staged and one of which is fatal), some kid playing with some fluid he found in his underwear, and a woman pulling down her adult son's tightie-whities and spanking his ass.

I envy Roger Ebert. Apparently, after you've reviewed movies for forty years, have your own show and win the Pulitzer, you can get away with reviewing the first eight minutes of a film and leave it at that. I can't. I sat all the way through this Godawful monstrosity just so I can tell you not to do the same. I'm tempted to call Us Sinners the worst horror movie I've seen this year…But JUST horror? JUST this year?

Tim was an odd little boy who grew into an odd little man. His insanely devout Christian mother beats him, his co-workers all laugh at him, and he takes his frustrations out by picking up hookers, choking them with his dick, beating them to death, suffocating them with trash bags and cutting off their toes.

He then meets a new co-worker, Louise, who doesn’t seem to treat him the same earned contempt that every one else does. She doesn’t fall into the ugly stereotypes of walking, ball-busting Oedipal concepts, catty ethnic co-workers and disposable, street-walking spank-dumpsters. No, Louise falls into what Nathan Rabin calls “The Manic Pixie Dream Girl,” who basically serves as that unattainable and untouchable woman who validates the lead character’s existence just by looking at him with pity…Which is an insulting stereotype in and of itself.

Now I know I’m reviewing a horror movie, and woman-hating and racism are par for the course, but Jesus H. Christ, can’t you be more creative than that?

And then, of course, there are the rape and murder scenes, which are somewhat undercut by the film’s attempts at humor… I think. Tim strips down to his tightie-whities (AGAIN!) and reveals big brown skid-marks, and even the rape is interrupted by Tim cutting a loud, wet fart. This film’s obsession with Tim’s butthole doesn’t end there, as not one, but TWO scenes are devoted to Tim making liquid dropsies while women (one of which is his mother) listen in.

Now does that make Us Sinners a film that is so bad it’s funny? No. In order to get to those bad, lazy laughs you have to wade through endless and innumerable driving scenes where the camera is places in the driver’s seat looking out the window while the same shitty jangly-pop song plays over the radio.

I know that as a critic, you’re not supposed to editorialize about what kind of person the director is. You’re supposed to review the work. But with a movie like Us Sinners, one can’t help but wonder whether this is a work of fiction or a kind of therapy session where the director and writer work out their gripes about women and God and their mommies. Because no one in the possession of their faculties could have written this with the ambition of entertaining an audience. Who the hell would write this stuff? Who the hell looks at said script and says “By jove, this will make a GREAT motion picture!”?

I haven’t mentioned any of the actors by name. They’re just starting out and none of the acting in this movie isn’t off-the-rails, Pocahauntus bad. So I’m feeling nice and will give them the benefit of the doubt.

I have not mentioned the writer by name either because, truth be told I can’t remember it. Us Sinners isn’t on IMDB and there is no way in hell I am putting the DVD back into my DVD player. Already I think it contracted some kind of exotic disease just from playing it. Like Legionnaire’s Disease or Projectile Leprosy.

But I do know the director’s name, and I will not mention it. That would provide publicity to someone who hasn’t earned it. After being inflicted with Us Sinners, I am not giving its perpetrator a cookie. But I do have questions.

Did this guy show this movie to his family?

And if so, what do you think they said to him afterwards? Did they manage to wring a choked “Yeah, sweetie, it was good,” out of themselves? Or was there a whole lot of perplexed staring?