Red State (2011) – Review

Ever since Clerks hit the scene back in 1994, Kevin Smith had carved a fairly impressive niche for himself as a guy who knew how to blend lewd slacker comedy with lashings of pop culture references. However, when it came time to temporarily put his View Askewniverse in mothballs and retire stoner icons Jay and Silent Bob, no one could predict what the Duke of Dick Jokes would pull out of his cap next.
A straight ahead horror/thriller that’s based loosely on both highly controversial pastor Fred Phelps and the Waco siege that occured in Texas isn’t exactly what you’d expect from the dude who penned the phrase “snoochie boochies”, and yet it soon became obvious that Smith wasn’t fucking around as he delivered a film utterly unlike anything he had attempted before.
But after trying to leave his previous works behind with the likes of Jersey Girl, Back & Miri Make A Porno and Cop Out, is Red State too much of a tonal shift for a guy who once wrote a diatribe about superhero sex organs.

Travis, Jared and Billy Bob are three highly sexed teens who finally figured out a way to get laid when they respond to an online invitation to indulge in some group fornication with a willing woman in the area. While they excitedly drive on their way to their gangbang, they manage to sideswipe a parked car containing the local sheriff who just so happens to be a closet homosexual and is currently engaging in sex with another man. Unable to report the accident in fear of being discovered, the sheriff passes on the details of the car to his deputy and then calls it a night, but unbeknownst to him, these seemingly unimportant events will soon spiral into absolute chaos.
After responding to the sex ad, the three boys find that they’ve been fed drugged beers and later wake up to find that they are the unwilling guests of the Five Points Trinity Church, a fanatical conservative church ran by the hate-speech spewing Abin Cooper. It seems that in an effort to do the “Lord’s work”, Cooper has been getting his subjects to set up honey traps in order abduct those he deems as sinners and after being responsible for a rash of murders in the gay community, have now targeted the trio of teens.
Meanwhile, after the deputy discovers their car on the orders of the sheriff after his little fender bender, Cooper’s people are forced to show their hand which, in turn, brings in Agent Joseph Keenan of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives into our bizarre little play and soon a full scale siege is in place with all the multiple players in this deadly farce finding their lives only a hair-trigger away from disaster. Will sanity prevail as the kidnapped teens find themselves stuck between two heavily armed forces, or will judgement come for them all in some form or another?

As a one time die hard acolyte of Kevin Smith’s earlier works and the View Askewniverse in general, I have to say I was initially very disappointed how the “maturing” of his career as a filmmaker was turning out. Zack & Miri was fun, sure and I didn’t think Jersey Girl was even remotely close to deserving the critical drubbing it got, but Cop Out was a such a painful disaster to experience it put an end to Smith’s attempts at more conventional filmmaking for good. And you know what? I’m glad it did, because even though it’s got its flaws, Red State is a bold, distinctive movie from a director that’s suddenly veered into trying a much more experimental voice than we’ve seen from this guy since the darker and somewhat more serious Chasing Amy way back in 1997. Basically, the whole modus operandi of Red State is to not only tap into the legitimately terrifying world of Christian fundamentalism, but it also plays with convention story telling methods that does everything in its power to keep you off balance to the point where you’re not even exactly sure who the protagonist or the antagonists truly are.
Oh, don’t get me wrong, it’s insanely obvious that the real villain here is religion gone horribly sour and there’s no mistaking Michael Parks chillingly deranged Abin Cooper as a man who is about as insane as a shithouse rat, but everybody else involved are all smeared with varying shades of grey as the story goes along.

At the beginning, it seems like our leads are the three, admittedly obnoxious teens played by Kyle Gallner, Michael Angarano and Nicholas Braun who head out to get laid in a way that feels uncomfortably like The Inbetweeners crossed with a trio of misogynistic frat boys; but after their posturing and toxic banter sees them take a hard swerve into Hostel territory, they swiftly become victims. However, it’s here that Smith chooses to muddy the waters because instead of forging on with an average torture porn flick with massive religious overtones, he starts aggressively flipping the script by bringing in more and more layers as the whole situation gradually unravels.
Before you know it, the story of three young men on the verge of being sacrificed becomes almost a side story as Smith pulls the aperture back to reveal yet more aspects of this rapidly snowballing situation. From there, the three teens tag out from lead duty only to tag in John Goodman as a federal agent who has to try an contain this situation despite the authorities now having a whole lot of luck with these situation, and things take another turn when one of the cops accidently shoot first and cause a massive firefight. This requires Keenan’s superiors to make a chillingly brutal judgement call and then the focus shifts again to Cooper’s granddaughter, Cheyenne, to take the spotlight as she figures she has to go against her family if she’s going to protect the children in her charge.
The constant 180 shifts that Smith pulls off feels highly reminiscent of what Zach Cregger later did with the magnificently bamboozling Barbarian and succeeds in making the entire experience completely and utterly unpredictable right down to a fascinating ending that is both preposterous and darkly hilarious. However, those expecting a more measured horror/thriller should be warned that the entirety of Red State does feel like the director wildly experimenting with his brand new genre shift. At times the film can be unsurprisingly overly talky and Smith makes a bold choice to make barely any of his characters likeable or virtuous leaving us with a very ugly movie. Similarly, while Parks is truly horrific as the hate spewing pastor and is truly harrowing to watch, the man is so good in the role that his long, rambling, anti-gay sermon probably could have been all the more devestating if it had been trimmed by half. But then, if Smith’s intention was to dunk us into this world of religious hate and hold us under the surface for an uncomfortably long time, I guess he succeeded – it’s not like horror movies about murderous cults are supposed to be warm and fuzzy.

Certainly not to everyone’s taste, Red State finally manages to show that Kevin Smith has more in the tank than just his beloved coming of age movies and endless podcasts. But even though the film probably has more in common with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre that Clerks, there’s still that wry sense of humour lurking under the horror. I mean, who else would end a movie about a ranting religious figure simply by having someone yell what we’re all thinking – “shut the fuck up!”
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