Susan Granger’s review of “Red State” (Lionsgate/Smodcast Pictures)
Best known for his low-budget comedies, like “Clerks” and “Mallrats,” writer/director Kevin Smith has now created a horror/thriller, focusing on a Christian fundamentalist group with a sinister agenda.
On his way to school in a small Southern town, teenage Travis (Michael Angarno) is distracted by protesters from the Five Points Church demonstrating at the funeral of a gay teenager. Later, his horny buddies, Jared (Kyle Gallner) and Billy Ray (Nicholas Braun), talk him into borrowing his parents’ car so that they can all drive into the country to meet Sarah (Melissa Leo), a middle-aged woman from an Internet site for group sex. En route, they accidentally sideswipe a parked car belonging to Sheriff Wynan (Stephen Root) who’s engaged in a homosexual act. Then – in a sinister bait-and-switch twist – after the boys arrive at appointed spot and drink a few beers, they’re kidnapped by members of the Five Points congregation, who are ritually – and righteously – killing ‘sinners’ who are bound to a cross under the explicit direction of fire-and-brimstone preacher Abin Cooper (Michael Parks). When the teens’ disappearance is reported, a military task force, headed by ATF agent Joseph Keenan (John Goodman), is dispatched to take Cooper’s heavily armed enclave by force.
After debuting at Sundance Film Festival last January, this ambitious, highly contentious film has been screened in several select cities and available on-demand for cable television customers. Always garrulous Kevin Smith has been ranting not only about the faults and fallacies of motion picture distribution but also about the dissemination of ideas or, in this case, the promulgation of hate-filled ideology based on intolerance.
Smith says he was inspired by infamous Pastor Fred Phelps and his Westboro Baptist Church, along with the 1993 Waco disaster. Smith’s wry, ironic humor occasionally surfaces during the subsequent bloodshed and carnage and, particularly, in a closing scene, when Keenan testifies before high-ranking government officials about the congregants and their neighbors.
On the Granger Movie Gauge of 1 to 10, “Red State” is a fanatical 5, destined to continue to incite controversy.
