Red State review

 

With the Red State tour stopping off in London we caught Kevin Smith's latest, and it's by far the best "41% Fresh" movie you're going to see this year

Many reviews of Kevin Smith's self-distributed indie movie Red State have fixated upon the director's public tirades against film critics, both during and since the poor critical response to Cop Out. This one won't, firstly because it smacks of sour grapes, but mostly because the film stands apart from its director, love him or hate him, in such a way that its background and publicity pales into insignificance.
Red State, as billed by Smith, is a horror film. I hadn't expected a drama in which people do horrific things, but that makes it scarier to me, because it's rooted in the banality of evil. Smith's career began with a study of the mundane and tangible setting of a convenience store, in 1994's Clerks, so perhaps that should have been expected. But still, there's no denying that it comes together in such a way that you would never know it was one of his.
We begin with Jarod (Kyle Gallner), Travis (Michael Angarano) and Billy-Ray (Nicholas Braun), three mid-American teenagers who head out into the woods on the promise of a ménage à quatre with a hot older woman. They wind up in the middle of Cooper's Dell, where they meet Sara (Melissa Leo) in her trailer. She gives them beer to warm up, and they guzzle it down, little realising that it's been spiked.
The three of them wake up inside the Five Points Church, a Christian fundamentalist organisation, made up of a family of gun-nuts and led by Pastor Abin Cooper (Michael Parks). Sara is his daughter, and the family are delivering what they believe is God's judgement upon homosexuals. Funnily enough, it's only at this point that the boys seem to twig that there might be a little too much sausage in that sex sandwich.
The cast credits at the end of the film divide the players up into sub-categories- “Sex”, “Religion” and “Politics”, three