Three teenage friends looking for sex get more than they bargained for when they get kidnapped by an ultra-conservative religious group, which then results in a bloody standoff with the ATF. Although billed as a straight horror film, Red State does something that others in the genre rarely do. From the first shot, the film begins building into a gritty, violent look at the underside of radical beliefs and broken ideals. That’s a lot of ground to cover, and for a simple horror flick, Red State aims higher than it probably has any right to, but there’s clearly more going on below the surface. Instead of settling for traditional horror tropes, the film deals in the real world evils of disaffected youth, wild-eyed religious discontent and corrupt government agencies, and it doesn’t pull punches once the bloodletting starts. (While writer/director Kevin Smith has often deflected any sort of political connotations of the film’s title, it’s not hard to connect those dots. To be clear, it’s an indictment of everything and everyone, but right-wingers seem to get it the worst.)
That Kevin Smith could write and direct such a strangely brutal and potentially incendiary film shouldn’t be all that surprising—fans will likely spot a familiar sting in the dialogue—but it is nonetheless. Here Smith is a new filmmaker, checking his usual low-brow raunch after the first fifteen minutes and letting his camera and actors propel the story forward, including Michael Parks as grandfatherly religious crackpot Abin Cooper, Kerry Bishe as the single voice of reason in Cooper clan and John Goodman as conflicted ATF agent who quickly finds himself in a no-win situation. To be fair, there are patches where the narrative feels ham-fisted—Goodman’s final scene, for instance—but what it lacks in precision it makes up with its wrenching left turns. From act to act, you won’t know who to root for (or if you even should) and by the end, you won’t be sure what you’ve just seen. It’s a refreshing challenge, particularly from Smith, and as horror movies go, Red State is far more ambitious than most in recent years.
