Film Review #1: "Red State"

Will Means

Cannes Study Abroad

05/15/11

Film Review #1:

Red State

It becomes obvious that Kevin Smith’s latest film, Red State, is going to suck within the first ten minutes that it plays. The opening sequence comes across as preachy and it leads us right into the rather uninteresting establishment of the film’s main characters. At first it almost seems like Smith’s career is reaching an unavoidable fate. In recent months, Smith has managed to become a bit too comfortably outspoken to the masses and after his last film, Cop Out, flopped, it seemed only fitting that the film deemed “Kevin Smith’s attempt at horror” would fail.

However, about thirty minutes into Red State, the film does something weird and unexpected… it gets good. This is the first of many shifts in the film’s vibe that occur throughout its runtime. What starts off as quite the sub-par opening soon becomes a disturbing depiction of a psychotically religious family (this is the point at which Red State is a bona-fide horror film, but that only lasts about 30 minutes or so), and then it becomes an action film, followed by a dark comedy for the closing scene. These shifts in the film are surprisingly unpredictable, but what is even more unpredictable is that the these shifts in Smith’s story actually work!

Red State tells the story of three teenage boys who respond to a woman’s ad on a pornographic website in which she offers her body up for casual sex with multiple men at once. She tells the boys that she wants all three of them at the same time, and they set off on a little road trip, hormones blazing, to go meet her. When they reach the woman’s trailer they are drugged and soon thereafter they awake in the middle of a nightmare. They have been kidnapped by the crazy religious group of the town. They are people who not only preach fire and brimstone messages about gays and sexually active youth burning in Hell, but they help send those people “to Hell” by wrapping them in plastic-wrap and blowing their brains out. This family doesn’t so much resemble conservative southern Baptists as much as it does the Church of Charles Manson. The family is absolutely crazy, and therein lies the fun. While the film is a horror film for about the first 30 minutes of the runtime, it soon turns into an hour-long shoot-out action movie, and it is a thrilling one at that. The action is impressively well-staged for such a low-budget film, and even more impressive is the film’s impeccable sound design. The shoot-out sequence sounds like something out of a Steven Speilberg war film, and it only serves to get the adrenaline of the viewer pumping even more.

The performances in the movie are extremely above average for a film of this type (type being a Kevin Smith horror film). Michael Parks plays the pastor and leader of the church group and boy does he really shine! He preaches his word with the conviction of someone like Charles Manson. His wildly darting eyes convince us that there are some wires loose in his head, and even in the midst of the horrible acts that he commits, he is able to exude a southern grandpappy-like charm towards his family and the local police force. Also a standout (and no surprise here) is Melissa Leo, who plays the member of the family who was the woman to actually lead the boys into the trap. Even with Michael Parks and Melissa Leo thrown into the equation, one of the real surprises for me was the girl who plays the oldest daughter of Leo’s character (I would put the character’s name here, but I have no internet and therefore no idea what the name was. Bummer.).

Another reason I have to give kudos to the film is for the realistic reactions from the actors to each of their given situations. Usually in horror films, a character can have just watched their best friend or lover get brutally murdered, and they’ll shrug it off and run along for pace’s sake. In Red State, characters actually react to other characters’ deaths. People weep over bodies, they go into shock, they become manic with rage, and they even throw up. The talent of the actors becomes very valuable for scenes like these, and all of the actors deliver it well.

To be quite honest, Red State was not at all the film I expected it to be. Its marketing has not been true to the film’s real subject matter, and the title of “Kevin Smith’s first horror film” led me to paint an entirely different picture of what the film would be like. I have to give it more points because in more ways than less, it was one of the most different and original films I have seen in quite some time. The film is batshit crazy, but I mean that in the best way. There is nothing more thrilling about it than watching the chaos completely explode and then build to a boiling point of a climax. The film’s ending is very reminiscent of the ending to the Coen Brothers’ Burn After Reading, as it features more businessmen discussing a huge tragedy and how they should cover it up in darkly comedic ways. It seems like such an ending would be out of place in such a film, but the comedy in the scene worked and fit in pretty seamlessly with the rest of the movie, and overall I felt like it was a nice touch. After things get as crazy as they do in the film, by the time you get to the end, it feels like there’s nothing better you could do than laugh.

So although it has its flaws, Red State is a thoroughly entertaining film. It’s graphically disturbing, genuinely funny, well acted, and tensely action-packed. And even though Smith seems to be pointing to conservative religious fanatics as his inspiration (especially with a title like Red State) the movie does not make one fear that the religious freaks of their town might be getting a little out of control, but rather that those religious freaks could turn out to be the full-on next Manson family…with machine guns.