The Virgin Sinners (Globetrotter Pictures, Searchlight Films, Neon Cinema Films, Arclight Films, Lifetime, 2020)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2021 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night I watched two surprisingly intriguing TV-movies on Lifetime, both of which did some creative variations on the typical Lifetime clichés. The first was shown as The Virgin Sinners, though it was originally a Canadian production under the title The Color Rose, which I suspect someone at one of the multifarious production companies that made this film (Globetrotter Pictures, Neon Cinema Films, Searchlight, Arclight) thought sounded too much like The Color Purple. So they changed it to The Sinners, only Lifetime’s people decided to add the “V”-word to make the film sound sleazier and more interesting to straight men. (I’ve previously noted the buzz-words Lifetime uses to get straight guys to watch the productions of what was originally billed as “television for women.” Along with “virgin,” they are “cheerleader,” “sorority” and “escort.”) The Virgin Sinners is an auteur work for Courtney Page, who not only directed but wrote the original story and co-wrote the script with Erin Hazlehurst and Madison Smith. Its central characters are seven high-school girls who form a clique and each take on the identity of one of the seven deadly sins – a much more interesting use of them than in those two silly Lifetime movies a while ago called Envy and Lust (based on novels by a “faith-based” African-American writer who did a cycle of novels, each of which would dramatize one of the sins with Black characters; she intended to do all seven but had only written four of the books when Envy and Lust were filmed).

The first 45 minutes of the film are narrated by one of the clique members, Aubrey Miller (Brenna Llewellyn), who appears to be telling the story from beyond the grave à la Scared to Death and Sunset Boulevard) as she asks us to ponder how she ended up at the bottom of a lake with a red rose in her mouth. But the ringleader of the group is Grace Carver (Kaitlyn Bernard), daughter of the small town’s insanely strict minister Dean Carver (Tahmoh Penikett), who’s constantly throwing heavy-duty punishments at Grace and her sister Hannah (Karis Cameron) intending to keep them on the straight, narrow and Godly as he defines them. Though the locale is unspecified, the small town where all this takes place is so faith-driven that, as Aubrey tells us in her narration, “the battle between church and state took place long ago – and church won.” Indeed, the most powerful aspect of Page’s movie is the skill and relentlessness with which she depicts the dictatorship of “virtue” that rules the place, and the hypocrisy of Pastor Dean, who makes a few of the requisite points about Christianity being a religion of love (he even quotes Jesus’s lines, “Where there is hatred, let me sow love”), but his is very much more a God-fearing than a God-loving faith, and “fear” not in the sense the term is sometimes rendered as “awe” but the literal fear of an all-powerful and all-vengeful God who will consign you to hell at the slightest provocation.

The plot revolves around an And Then There Were None-style gimmick in which the members of the Seven Deadly Sins cult get knocked off one by one (by a killer wearing the requisite ski mask, the usual “uniform” of Lifetime murderers before black hoodies replaced them), each with a different color rose stuck in their mouths to represent the “sin” they played in the group. It’s also a Queer love story in that Grace and one of the other girls fall in love with each other and we even get to see them suck face (not anything more, alas!) despite their knowledge from their church that homosexuality is itself a sin (even though it isn’t mentioned in the Seven Deadlies) and enough to make them burn for all eternity. There are problems with The Virgin Sinners (a title that seems to have been inspired by Courtney Page’s decision to make the girl embodying “lust” still be a virgin – she tried to seduce a teacher’s assistant in her history class but he turned her down), including an overly complicated plot line that tends to blur the girls together (all I can remember about them is that one of them was Black) and a surprise ending in which the killer turns out to be the local coroner, Earnest Feldman (Jerry Trimble), a Satanist wanna-be who’s fond of lighting candles and drawing pentagrams, who hooked up with Aubrey Miller – who faked her own death so she could “cleanse” the town by knocking off her fellow pretend “sinners.”

But as many weaknesses as their are in this plot, they’re more than made up for by the overall subtlety of Page’s story and the relentlessness with which she depicts a town so obsessed with avoiding “sin” as defined by this highly nasty, vindictive, patriarchal sort of Christianity that (like the real-life punk scene in Salt Lake City my husband Charles has told me about) almost inevitably generates its opposite simply because “faith” is the ruling authority and anyone who wants to be a rebellious youth (or a rebellious not-so-youth) has to take it on. There’s an engaging subplot involving the local sheriff, Fred Middleton (Aleks Paunovic), who seems to be screwing around as kinkily as possible – he’s tall, rather craggy, looks well-hung even in his sheriff’s uniform (and Page gives us a lot of crotch shots just to make the point – he’s as close as this film is going to get to an icon of masculinity, especially since aside from a few hangers-on boys scarcely seem to exist at this high school) and has a penchant for having sex in the room where the school keeps its religious books – though eventually it turns out that the partner he’s screwing in these kinky situations is his own wife and he’s desperate to father a child. They’re timing it (using the rhythm method in reverse to maximize her chances of conception. Sheriff Middleton gets ordered off the murder investigation by a couple of out-of-town cops who try to boss him and his deputy around – a typical bit of big-city chauvinism shown up when Middleton and his deputy, Detective O’Ryan (Lochlyn Murray), solve the crimes without their unwelcome help. The Virgin Sinners is a good deal better than I expected and one Lifetime movie I wouldn’t mind watching again – there seem to be subtleties in Page’s conception that it would take a second viewing to spot – and despite some lapses into cliché it’s a philosophically and morally sophisticated work, a good deal beyond what you expect from this network and its usually only barely flexible formulae.