Red State (2011)

Directed by: Kevin Smith
Written by: Kevin Smith
Starring: Michael Parks, Melissa Leo, John Goodman, Michael Angarano, Ronnie Connell
Rated: R 

Three teenage boys in some backwater city discover a phone app somewhere along the lines of a straight man's equivalent to Grindr. Travis explains to Billy-Ray and Randy that an older woman is interested in a four-way with the three of them, and with the prospect of wild sex tantalizingly close the three venture further into the unmentioned waters of America. But they are tricked and trapped by a group of religious zealots with far more sinister/benevolent intentions.

Director Kevin Smith has tapped into a hot button issue by *very* thinly veiling the Westboro Baptist Church as the Five Points Trinity Church, an inbred ultra-religious sect that even the neo-Nazis have distanced themselves from. Headed by the articulate and infuriatingly charismatic Abin Cooper (Michael Parks), his church of about two dozen pride themselves not only in disrupting the funerals of dead gay men, but in secretly being their killers.

Smith's own brand of horror reminds me of "Hostel", which intermingles politics and wild imagination to take the audience to places of extreme hatred and dread. His idea is a good one, but one curiously similar to Westboro's own brand of terrorism. They spout hellfire and toss angry words in the same way he shows them as a religious cult with no sense of reality. To turn us against them he presents us with the last resort of the Church. Smith uses fear to influence our own political and social attitudes. Not that I really disagree with the message; I rather liked the concept of the film. I do however feel it was not a fully formed idea and was simply something that Smith put to paper and onto screen rather quickly.

The boys are drugged and kidnapped and brought to Five Points compound, a massive property that serves as both church and bunker. Beneath the living quarters where presumably all members reside is a stockroom full of AK-47s and just about every other kind of instrument of terror. (How this very tiny congregation full of people I doubt could ever attain and hold a job is able to afford tens upon tens of thousands of dollars worth of equipment like that is never fully explained. I suppose it's because they can't be taxed...and I'm sure Smith would say the same). There we listen to Abin give his fire and brimstone speech before the killings begin, which are only halted when a freak leak in information draws the attention of the police. The last twenty minutes is an overlong standoff between the two heavily armed groups.

The story is as thin as the characters, the only one of which having any flesh is Agent Joseph Keenan (John Goodman) who heads the attack on the Cooper compound. So we go from erotic teenage drama to cultish horror film to gunfire-laden thriller. And all of this is capped off with a monologue by Goodman which was basically Smith's way of explaining the stuff he chose not to film and then to stick his chubby little fingers into the story and blatantly drop some of his beliefs into a story that already spoke for itself.

I fear now that I'm becoming wearied by Smith's lack of editing skills. He says he is only interested in making so many films, but if the guy has this much to say about everything and thinks we want to hear all of it then he should make a few more. Or at the very least condense some of the more outrageous ideas and do the dialogue-heavy drama that I've been waiting to see. If not, then thicken up the premise of your horror film and cut out the nonsense of the third act. He's just squeezing too much muchness into too few films.

There is so much potential from a film about believers as movies like "Rosemary's Baby" and "House of the Devil" have shown us. Undoubtedly there are people who are more extreme than the Westboro who would nod their heads in agreement with Abin Cooper's preachings. For all of the squeamish and sickening prospects of a film like this, Smith never explored all of the possibilities of the topic making his final project feel more like a first draft.

1.5/4