(Blood &) Sinners

I watched this movie in April or May 2025. The German title is Blood & Sinners, while the US title seems to be just Sinners. Overall, the music is entertaining, but I don't get the fawning reviews elsewhere.

I found the movie a bit aimless, and a hodgepodge of interesting ideas. Overall, I think it has more promise than the movie realized. There are some plots that don't go anywhere, which suggests to me that the script went through several rewrites or is a combination of several other scripts.

The setting of the movie is the Deep South in the 1930s.

The population are: (Former) Slaves, (Irish) Whites, the token Asians.

Genre: Vampire Splatter Music Movie

Content-wise, the music gets short-changed. I saw this movie billed as a musical, but to me, it is not. To me, a musical means that the song advances the story and exposes some inner monologue of the actors, which does not happen here at all. I've learned that the term of art is Book Musical. Polyphonic has a treatise on Sinners, and from there it could fall under the type of Backstage Musical.

The Blues/Music gets built up as driving element of the story, except that the idea and the general idea of magic music is lost after its expositional scene.

The story beats are mildly aligned with From Dusk 'Till Dawn (which is fine, From Dusk 'Till Dawn is a good movie).

Some of the story turns are quite weakly motivated. One person runs away in the middle of the battle without motivation. There are some mexicans that have one scene, seemingly hunting for vampires. Who are they and why are they there? The ending is a cliffhanger-style sequel setup.

Weirdly enough, this movie rates as a top movie for 2025 with 7.7 on IMDB, but maybe that is because there were no better movies at the time ?!