Brain Frappe anyone! Us Sinners

Us Sinners from Writer/Director George Snow is exactly the kind of micro budget production that I love to find! The picture is a blistering character study of a disturbed individual and it hits all of its marks. Reminiscent of Travis Miller's recent Bloodstained Romance, Us Sinners takes us deep into the daily life of a broken man and the motivations behind his aberrant activities. As was the case with Millers production, Snow allows us to see 'Tim' (Brandon Schraml) as a human being. Tim is not an unstoppable and hulking killing machine, he is a man-boy that seeks acceptance he will never get from people whose normality he both covets and resents at the same time.

"The son pays for the sins of his father," says Tim's mother (Leslie E. Hughes), and 'Mom' intends to make Tim pay in spades for the transgressions of his Dad, a violent misogynistic homosexual. As the film progresses from its opening moments depicting a particularly violent and ugly blow job it never treads in exploitation territory, but rather seeks to provide the audience with answers as to why the actions they see taking place are happening. Tim is routinely subjected to proselytizing from his religious zealot mother who preaches endlessly while cutting down everyone around her and pointing out all of their foibles, especially Tim's. She controls every facet of his life and even tells him when it is time to have a bowel movement.

The constant nagging and trauma suffered at home have just begun to manifest themselves in Tim's burgeoning sexuality. He has begun to pick up prostitutes and after violently assaulting them, he kills them and mutilates their corpses. Director Snow has quite skillfully managed to weave his story in a manner that is sure to please gorehounds with its startling moments of bloodshed while at the same time satisfying the more cerebral with the films psychological aspects. Tim actually has moments of genuine reflection. These breakthroughs in no way endear the audience to his character however they do serve to humanize an individual that a lesser filmmaker would have simply portrayed as non-thinking machine of evil.

What makes it all work is a uniformly good cast whom all deliver solid and natural performances. There are no showboats here and there are no weak links. Brandon Schraml is particularly impressive in his portrayal of Tim. He effortlessly makes the leap from put upon whipping boy, hard pressed to form a coherent sentence, to that of a sadistic and believable psychopath who viciously dominates and taunts his victims before slaughtering them. Equally impressive are Leslie E. Hughes as Tim's domineering mother whose true nature is finally revealed in the films disturbing climax, and Brenda Cooney as 'Louise', a co-worker that Tim is infatuated with. I kept waiting for a crack to appear in the narrative but thanks to his excellent casting and more than competent direction, George Snow has managed to produce a mini-masterpiece of depravity and dysfunction taken to the extreme.

Take a trip into the mind of a lunatic and see what it takes to drive someone to commit crimes of this nature. At no point does Snow's film ever lose its grip on reality. The characters come off as people who could be your neighbors and the detours into the macabre are gruesome without ever being gratuitous. That isn't to say that fans of grue will be disappointed, there is a world class toe-cutting sequence, a brain frappe, genital mutilation, and a naughty bit with a sanitary napkin that has to be seen to be believed, all in all Us Sinners is the ticket to your horror salvation and I strongly recommend you seek this one out!

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