The movie starts out with the daughter being a b!tch, I detected a little racism from the daughter in the beginning, but that was it, she just started acting super rebellious and stupid. Then the daughter, who didn't like the reverend in the beginning ended up being fooled by and falling for his BS. The mother was annoying and blind, whining and crying instead of just disciplining her daughter and staying away from DJ, two dead wives (suspicious) and she marries him. She wasn't sure if she were being poisoned or not until she guessed reverend "killer" DJ's laptop password to see what he was up to. The movie was rushed and the ending sucked, I wanted the whole town to see what he was.
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janmarju11 September 2017
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I was originally fooled by the title, SINISTER MINISTER, but hung around to watch this LIFETIME feature. A charismatic minister DJ (Ryan Patrick Shanahan) charms a single mother Trish (Nikki Howard) into falling in love with him not much after his wife is killed in a car crash. She thinks the young minister is just the right fit to bring stability to her new beginnings with her teen daughter Siena (Angela Briones). Very soon Trish notices that her new husband seems to have an emotional attraction to her pretty daughter. Based on true events with legal ramifications still in Pennsylvania courts.
Rounding out the cast: Sophia Thomas, Jon Briddell, Liz Fenning and Rachel G. Whittle. -
wes-connors2 June 2017There is no mystery concerning the identity of the psycho killer in "Sinister Minister". The story opens with charismatic reverend Ryan Patrick Shanahan (as DJ) explaining how God has blessed his adulterous self with an attractive blonde. After losing his wife in a convenient car accident, Mr. Shanahan weds the blonde. Meanwhile, the small town "Bright Side" welcomes two attractive brunettes. The new arrivals are single mom Nikki Howard (as Patricia "Trish" Corbett) and her pot-smoking 18-year-old daughter Angelica Briones (as Sienna). This being a "Lifetime" TV movie, you should bet on Shanahan offering Ms. Howard the missionary position that opens up in church after his newest wife dies. And, what the hell, how about installing the teenage daughter in a love nest...
After all, the Lord commanded, "Go forth and multiply!"...
There is some fun in watching deranged killers do their dirty work. This story has one of the key ingredients, a fine performance by Shanahan as the unholy minister. However, one of the other things necessary is a satisfying backstory. We know the "Sinister Minister" had a bad childhood, but are not clear about what his problems are, exactly...
The material we receive is poorly organized...
Watch, for example, one of the less flashy, but most memorable scenes. We see the leading woman has taken a job waitressing at the local diner, where "Sinister Minister" Shanahan burns the late afternoon oil. Business is slow and Howard is not impressing the boss. She is notified daughter Briones is missing from school. Understandably frantic, Howard leaves work and loses her job. Shanahan comes to her rescue, but their conversation outside goes on too long and abandons the desperate tone that should have ended the scene. The inside banter between the waitresses and way director Jose Montesinos brought the main characters together was, otherwise, quite good. Elsewhere, there is too little interaction between the characters, especially involving teenager Briones.
***** Sinister Minister (5/28/2017) Jose Montesinos ~ Ryan Patrick Shanahan, Nikki Howard, Angelica Briones -
tisa-0107825 May 2021This movie was completely stupid and atrocious on every level. It didn't know which way it wanted to go and didn't make any sense whatsoever. The acting was also horrendous. I'm mainly referring to the mother and the female officer. I could've made a much better movie using randomly picked people off the street. This is honestly the absolute worst movie I've seen in a VERY long time.
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haroot_azarian29 August 2020So a divorcee mom and rebellious daughter get introduced to a church and she freely enjoys flirting with the minister even right in front of his sick wife. Oh and almost kisses him on his own porch! Then on the evening of his wife's funeral the minister and the mom play tonsil hockey n her house!. then the daughter starts cozying up to him. My impression was that basically she was a sad desperate MILF. Too ridiculous to be based on a true story f you ask me!
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***CONTAINS SPOILERS***
So here we have the innocent, charismatic "Man of God" who professes having a past fit for Satan (much to the joy and giggles of his small town congregation) who also is a beast in bed, slaying woman after woman (pun intended) without a flinch from society.
Along comes his next catch - who moved to the small town to work at a diner and drives an Audi (did I see that right?). She has a daughter who is immediately creeped out by the Rev. Soon enough though, wife #2 is down for the count and within a shake, the Rev is making out with the new catch. Daughter catches them and is disgusted; she's been rebelling hard against mom and magically, Rev convinces her to cool it. He begins to draw daughter close while mom watches, seemingly creeped out. Rev and mom talk nasty in the bedroom while wife #2 is dying; nobody bats an eye. Things get super creepy when Rev gives daughter weed and they exchange perverted compliments. Daughter gets caught with weed, baby daddy comes to take her and then, for no reason, turns her over to mom while daughter is suddenly eager to leave mom (why does she hate her mom so much?) Blah, blah, blah.. on and on the twisted fantasies unravel. -
kefalasgeorge31 July 2022How is it possible that Americans can make such absurd movies ? The whole premise is absolutely idiotic, the acting is juvenile ,the plot is laughable .
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soulfunkyjazz26 June 2023I liked the concept of this movie but it could have been so much more .The lead character the church minister the actor who played him was good enough with the material that he had for the part but its as if the editors cut all the best scenes out of it .Theres no actual horror in this movie just implemented scenes that show the main character was doing his dirty deeds .You don't actually see any physical violence that one would expect in this genre which is supposed to be horror .Its almost cheesy all the way thru the movie i was expecting something really explosive or something that would shock me but it didn't happen i was expecting the minister when he was caught by the authorities to die in some major dynamic scene of some sort but it didn't happen one big anti climax. I liked the title of the movie but the movie just didn't live up to it.
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chiumt4 July 2019You can see it from the eyes. That is the acting, and it is quite mediocre. And the dialogue sometimes sends chills down my spine. It is based on a true story. But the story is not very credible. I was quite bored frankly.
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mgconlan-129 May 2017Lifetime's "Premiere" for Sunday, May 28, 2017 was something with the risible title "Sinister Minister" (just try to say that without at least chuckling!), though it was filmed under the less silly but also less clear-cut title "Brightside" — spelled on the film's IMDb.com page as one word even though the actual name of the town where it takes place is "Bright Side" — two words. The film begins with what's by far its best sequence, a hot sexual encounter between the titular sinister minister, known only by his initials "D. J." (Ryan Patrick Shanahan) and a woman he's having an adulterous affair with, though he's feeding her the usual malarkey about how God wouldn't be making it possible for them to love each other if God didn't think it was right. Then D. J. receives word that his wife is dead — she was found hanged in their garage and the officials rule her death a suicide — and a typical Lifetime title advances the time frame to "Three Years Later." Three years later D. J. is the minister in a small town called Bright Side, the woman we saw him adulterously having sex with in the prologue is his wife, but he's already set his sights on her replacement — or rather replacements, since he's attracted to both Patricia "Trish" Corbett (Nikki Howard) and her daughter Sienna (Angelica Briones). Trish got pregnant with Sienna when she was just 15, though she must have married Sienna's dad, since he's discussed in the movie and there's no indication he's a step-parent — but the two divorced a year earlier and Sienna started cutting up, misbehaving, doing worse at school and smoking marijuana after her dad and mom broke up.
Determined to keep her away from the big city and the kinds of trouble Sienna could get into there, Trish moves the two of them to Bright Side, where they check out D. J.'s church one Sunday morning. D. J. checks them out as well, much to Sienna's initial displeasure — "Mom, he's looking at my boobs!" she complains — and she makes it clear she's bored by the whole church thing and suspicious of D. J.'s intentions towards her mom as well as her. Mom, however, is enthralled by the church in general and D. J. in particular, and D. J. is so obviously drooling over both Trish and Sienna I half-expected him to announce to them, "I've decided to leave my church and become a Fundamentalist Mormon, so I can marry both of you." D. J. first sets his sights on Trish, offering her a job when her previous employer, the owner of the "Friendly Joe's" restaurant at which she was working as a waitress, fires her for taking calls on her cell phone at work. He's got a wife already, but a sinister car accident out in the boonies around Bright Side takes care of that little problem; he lives, she dies and the authorities call it an "accident." Then Sienna comes home a few days after D. J.'s last wife died in the "accident" and finds him and her mom necking on the couch, leaves in disgust and locks herself in her room to smoke pot. When D. J. tries to talk to her, she rather coldly informs him that his youth slang is about two decades out of date — presumably it was what was current when he was still roadie'ing for that mysterious big rock band — and Sienna is put out enough by her mom's actions with D. J. that when the two actually get married (with the ceremony officiated by the Black assistant minister in his church) Sienna is nowhere to be found, just as she bolted the funeral service for D. J.'s immediately previous wife.
This being a Lifetime movie, most of Bright Side's little police force buys that the death of the previous Mrs. D. J. was an accident, but not female detective Leslie Mann (Rachel G. Whittle); she's already suspicious that the minister has lost two wives in three years, and she gets even more suspicious when Trish's ex, John Wells (Jeff Marchelletta), turns up in Bright Side. Shortly after he arrives, he disappears and ostensibly takes Sienna with him — Trish finds her room empty and she's left behind a computer-printed letter saying she's left Bright Side to live in the city with her dad — but then a couple of hikers in the woods around Bright Side spot a body that turns out to be John's. "Sinister Minister" was supposedly based on a true story, the arrest and conviction of Rev. Arthur Schirmer in 2013 for the murder of his wife Betty Jean in 2008, followed by his plea of no contest to a charge that in 1999 he killed his first wife Jewel — and it was in connection with the real-life Schirmer case that headline writers apparently coined the phrase "the sinister minister." What's weak about "Sinister Minister" the movie is that the writer and José Montesinos, who directed effectively given what he had to work with, really didn't offer much insight into What Made D. J. Run — a passing remark he makes towards the end about having had an overprotective mother is as close as we get to an explanation for why he's the way he is — and it also doesn't help that the casting person, Scotty Mullen, came up with three women, including Rachel G. Whittle as the woman cop, who look pretty interchangeable. "Sinister Minister" is frustrating because with a little more care, especially in the writing department, it could have been considerably better than the common run of Lifetime movies (where was Christine Conradt that week when they needed her?); instead it's just another sporadically interesting film in which Ryan Patrick Shanahan's performance as D. J. is neither subtle and complex enough to be a genuinely convincing seducer/villain nor flaringly psycho enough to make the character scary. -
He is not a serial killer as stated. He has a definite sinister purpose of murdering his victims.
The guy as a preacher equates himself to holier than thou, reciting from the scriptures repeatedly as if to prove his point. In the meantime, he is as sick as they come, finding his victim and when the latter no longer serves a purpose or may interfere in other designs, he eliminates them.
He has already done this to two wives and he takes a definite interest in a woman and her rebellious daughter who have moved into town. Wife #2 is soon "liberated" and this modern day sick Romeo soon has designs on the mother. The cocky daughter realizes what this guy is up to and she soon becomes victim to his charms.
When her ex-husband and girl's father enters the picture, he is conveniently eliminated as well. Only a savvy female police officer is able to put together that being widowed twice before age 50 is sending up a red flag. -
lavatch9 June 2020In "Sinister Minister," the pastor of the fictional town of Brightside has fallen to dark side due to weakness of the flesh. After meeting newcomer Trish Corbett, the pastor known to the town as DJ makes the decision to eliminate his wife Betsey in a staged auto accident. This follows the mysterious death of his previous wife, Jewel, who allegedly hanged herself.
Trish has in tow a feisty daughter named Siena, who instantly recognizes DJ as a charlatan. It was a weakness of the screenplay that the savvy eighteen-year-old would suddenly change her tune, fall prey to the reverend's charms, and begin an affair with him, selling out her poor mother.
It was equally improbable that Trish would virtually beg DJ to marry her shortly after the death of Betsey. It made no sense when Trish's ex named Wells failed to show up for a dinner, Trish panicked by agreeing to tie the knot with DJ. Unbeknownst to her, DJ had tidied up loose ends by murdering the decent Wells.
The actor playing DJ turned in admirable work as the hustler who bamboozled women for his lascivious urges. Thanks to the efforts of a wily female detective, the walls start to close in on DJ. The sinister minister is exposed for the fraud, womanizer, and murderer who has brought pain and anguish to the community of Brightside.