Sins of Our Youth

Director - Gary Entin (How Sarah Got Her Wings, My Eleventh)
Starring - Lucas Till (X-Men First Class, Laid to Rest), Joel Courtney (Super 8, R.L. Stine's The Haunting Hour), and Mitchel Musso (Monster House, King of the Hill)
Release Date - 2014
Genre - Thriller
Format - Streaming (Online Screener)

Rating (out of 5):

     I hate my internet provider.  Hate them with a passion.  They put my area in a chokehold in terms of who can service the area with residential internet.  Sadly, they have bullied the other providers out of the area resulting in them being the only company able to service my zip code.  This sucks because their internet is not strong enough to stream unless you are using Netflix.  I don't know why but Netflix streams just fine but YouTube, Vimeo, and Hulu are a headache to try and use.  YouTube is not as bad as the others unless the video is more than 10 minutes long then you have to buffer for an ungodly amount of time.  Why am I telling you this?  Well, mostly because I'm sitting on several films that were sent to me for review that are only available on YouTube and Vimeo.  One such film is the 2014 thriller Sins of Our Youth.  The film looked interesting enough so I requested a review copy of the film.  Something happened and I never actually received the film and was sent a link as a back up for never receiving the disc.  Thanks guys for allowing Horror Society and myself the opportunity to see it!

     The film follows four teenage boys.  Tyler and David are going to be home alone for a few days so they decide to drink and shoot their father's guns while they have no parental supervision.  Their friends Scott and Carlo join in on the fun.  They all get a different gun and shoot up Tyler and David's Christmas decorations.  When they take a closer look at the now demolished decorations they find the body of a child that lives nearby.  They bring the body into the garage until they figure out what to do.  The group is torn between calling the cops or hiding their crime.  They go to school the next day as if nothing had happened but that evening they come up with a plan.  They will get four drives and on each drive record three of them admitting to the crime and rotating between the group until there was a drive showing that each was innocent.  They would then kill each other until only one is standing.  The one survivor will then destroy the other three drives before calling the police.  However, paranoia sets in and some believe this is the wrong thing to do while others suffer trust issues thinking it is a rouse to kill them.

     I had no idea what to expect from Sins of Our Youth.  I knew it wasn't going to be a horror story but I have been digging a lot of modern thrillers so I was more opened minded towards this one than most in the past.  I was very surprised by how this film unfolded and how well it was made.  The acting in this one is questionable.  Not that the cast is bad or untalented but some of the scenes just felt as if they didn't have the same momentum as the rest of the film.  The acting is not consistent throughout.  The story for this one is very interesting but I can see several out there with their heads up their asses attempt to say that this is a film about stricter gun laws and blah blah blah.  The story could be argued that but to me it was just telling the story of what a group of panicked teenage boys would do when faced with a grave decision.  The film does start out with some action and a pivotal moment in the story before teetering off to a slow pace.  A little more to the story would have made this one a solid film all the way through.  Finally, those of you looking for blood and gore will not find it here.  The dead body is bloody but due to the fact he is underage they director went with a more subtle approach and not depict him getting shot.  The effects are solid for what we get but we don't get the kills most horror and thrillers give us.  Overall, Sins of Our Youth is a very dark thriller that touches on real life. The film has very real characters that find themselves in a situation that can happen.  Their solution may be absurd but their situation is real.  Real life horror is scarier than anything someone could think up.