Summary
Sins and Seduction is everything you’d expect from a TV movie; uninspiring, slightly cheesy, but serves one guarantee – drama.
Now that I’ve delved into a Hallmark Movie, I thought I’d punish myself further and watch a Lifetime Movie. It’s difficult to review a TV movie in the same breath as a cinematic release because the channels I’ve described serve one purpose only when releasing films: drama. Sins and Seduction is like that; each scene has a dramatic point to prove – a three-act guide in how to reach its objective through persistent exposition.
Sins and Seduction has all the bearings of a shit-show waiting to happen; pastor Leslie Reynolds (Nicky Whelan) introduces a new married couple in town, Gareth (Brandon Quinn) and Emma Wilkinson (Blair Bomar), who are having issues. To cut the summary of the story short, because most of the background information is not worth the time: Gareth is a weird, sinister man, who cradles the bible and takes the words too literally. He spends most of the film trying to seduce the pastor, who kind of likes it, but she is torn by the temptation and her faith in God.
There’s a dark undertone to this story; the opening scene showed Gareth when he was a child getting berated by his religious mother for being too dirty before attending Church – this has led him to suffer a lifetime of OCD, and give him serial-killer-like instincts if the woman he is courting is not pure. He talks about “purity” a lot, as he does not like feeling dirty, but then again, the story does not make sense, as he will happily do the gardening with his top off, or paint fences etc. which in effect, makes you dirty. But let’s not worry too much about the details.
Sins and Seduction is all about Gareth acting as creepy as possible to try and secure the pastor for life, while also trying to keep hidden his secret past. For most of the movie, nothing is suspected, and it really is scene-by-scene exposition until the end. There is no filler scene to describe what happened when time passed; one minute he’s in church inviting the pastor over for coffee, the next scene Leslie is in his house feeling uncomfortable. The movie plays a lot with themes about sins, confessions and getting tested by God, but you may as well disregard that, grab the popcorn and enjoy the overplayed dialogue.
The one bonus Sins and Seduction holds is that the performances are actually good. The cast does a job worthy enough to prevent the story from being insufferable. But in a nutshell, the movie is about a religious nutjob who swerves on the killer side, and he attends church with other attractive church people. That’s drama, people.
