Movie Review: 'Children of Sin' is Better Poster than a Movie

Children of Sin has a terrific movie poster. The poster is 80’s style, hand drawn, animated art that evokes the aesthetic of direct to VHS horror movie discoveries of the 1980s. It’s a great poster that creates an aesthetic expectation that is sadly unfulfilled in the actual movie. Whereas the poster is distinctive and eye-catching, the movie is indistinct and rather by the numbers in style and in execution.

Children of Sin stars Meredith Mohler as Emma, a teenager who is being abused in her new living situation. Emma’s mom is set to marry a domineering bully named Robbie (Jeff Buchwald) and it has placed a remarkable strain on their mother-daughter relationship. Emma’s adopted brother, Jackson (Lewis Hines), is adjusting better but he has a secret that threatens the growing comfort he has with Robbie.

Jackson is beginning to understand that he is gay and Robbie, being a religious conservative, does not take kindly to finding out that is prospective son is a homosexual. With Emma acting out defiantly and Jackson struggling with his identity, Robbie pushes their mom to get them some help from their deeply controlling and conservative church. That help comes in the form of The Abraham House, a home for wayward children run by church member Mary Esther (Jo Anne Robinson).

Part gay conversion center and part reform school, The Abraham House House is really a cover story for a church that weeds out the bad seeds by having Mary Esther reform troubled teenagers or kill them trying. Once inside The Abraham House, Emma and Jackson slowly uncover the church-wide conspiracy to murder the gay community and get rid of anyone who doesn’t fall completely in line with the religious conservative values of this unnamed church.

It’s clear from the posters and marketing of Children of Sin that the filmmakers would like the Mary Esther character to be a kind of iconic horror movie villain. Actress Jo Anne Robinson certainly got the memo on how to create an over the top horror villain as she descends the character directly into camp broadness. Mary Esther has a secret past of her own that provides her deeply disturbed motivations and Robinson certainly does give life and energy to the contradictions of a religious conservative villain.

That said, too much of Children of Sin lacks the same camp sensibility of Robinson’s performance. The film takes far too long to establish Mary Esther, who only joins the movie in the second act, and by the time she arrives we’ve been through a rather pedestrian horror story with lead characters who aren’t particularly memorable. The lead teenagers are bland and while they are sympathetic, compared to their parents and the evil church, there is little else compelling about the leads.

I didn’t want them to die but that’s about all of the emotion I was able to muster for these mundane teenage characters. The supporting players at The Abraham House are slightly more interesting but the stop-start establishment of these supporting characters often trips up our investment in them, and their fates quickly become obvious as the movie is clearly pairing down to having Jackson and Emma as our most likely survivors.

While the poster for Children of Sin wonderfully evokes our nostalgia, nothing in the movie, aside from Robinson’s high camp villain, is able to match the aesthetic genius of the poster. The visual style of Children of Sin is low budget and mundane. The lights and sets are functional at best which would be fine if the poster didn’t create the expectation of a movie that might stand out either as evoking horror from the 70s and 80s or, at the very least, look different from other modern horror movies. The visual style of Children of Sin is bland and unmemorable which sadly can also be said of the lead characters.

Buy the poster and skip the movie. Children of Sin will be available via streaming rental services as of April 22nd, 2022.