Watched the movie “Sinners”, a period piece about vampires in the deep South in the 1920s. It got a lot of good reviews. I figured I’d love it since I love period pieces that cross genres. I figured wrong.
Spoilers ahead, so you are warned.
The first hour was pretty good, some pointless graphic sex scenes and violence that did nothing for the story. Nice costuming and settings. The story revolves around a young blues musician and his cousins who are gangsters from Chicago. They open up a juke joint with what is evidently stolen money.
The brothers go meet with some of their old flames and friends, one of which is a woman who practices hoodoo.
Then, quite randomly the scene changes and a vampire shows up at a sharecropper house, blistered from being in the sun, pursued by native americans who apparently know what it is. The farmers let the vampire in. The hunters ask about it, say this was a bad man and just wander off since it is getting dark. This makes no sense whatsoever.
During the opening night of the joint, the vampire, and the couple he turned, show up. They are white so aren’t invited in. So they manage to get a couple of people who go outside who were already invited in. The turning into vampires is pretty much immediate.
After this, things completely breakdown, as if the writers had no idea what to do with the story. Multiple interesting threads are simply ignored for pointless gore. And the gore is ridiculous with blood fountaining around like the silly scene in Mel Brook’s Dead and Loving it:
At one point, the vampires can just come into the joint. If you blink, you miss where one character says “come get me” in a chaotic scene which evidently is enough of an invite. Then there is a rather mediocre version of the dance in the Thriller video to irish music, and finally a ridiculous finale where the vampires all die from not paying attention to the sunrise, and the “hero” machine guns some klansmen. A chill at the end has some vampires still alive.
Again, so many good plot points, and characters, but nothing done with them at all. It’s simply not worth watching.
Some great reviews of this nonsense here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Cinema/comments/1kcq8cj/why_sinners_2025_isnt_a_great_movie_and_how_fake/
Club Schadenfreude 
Thanks for the review! I love a good vampire movie, and it’s good to know that this is not a good vampire movie!
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I was so disappointed. It is a lovely movie in spots, like this part:
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I saw this one a while back. The way it started off, I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to watch. But the production is very good, so that kept me following along to see how this ends up. I had not read any reviews, and was somewhat surprised when it turned into a vampire thing. The Indians, I thought, knew exactly what the guy the couple were harboring was. And they tried to get them to turn the guy out so they could deal with it. I figured they also knew the fate of those who took him in. Being wiser that us Caucasian dumbasses, they got out of Dodge before dark. I felt like the ending was a gratuitous gratification of the just desserts of the KKK assholes. I’d give it a 5.5 out of ten. I wouldn’t call it unwatchable, it had some moments, but it did lack in places.
It sort of reminded me of “From Dusk Till Dawn” in a way. But mostly black characters, and set in the 20’s or 30’s.
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yep, definitely reminicent of “From Dusk Til Dawn”.
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