Billed as a horror movie, Kevin Smith's first supposed foray into the genre is really more of a "extremists causing chaos" movie. It certainly has a horror movie set up (evoking Eli Roth's Hostel), but then it quickly switches gears. As Red State opens, three horny teens answer an online ad inviting them to engage in a gang bang with an older woman. When they eventually meet their online dream woman, she isn't necessarily who she claims to be and what starts off as a Porky's style romp quickly detours into a sinister tale about a religious extremist (played by a creepy cool Michael Parks) and his disciples. While Smith (Clerks, Chasing Amy) has certainly ventured into new terrain here, the film isn't without his trademark comical flourishes and even though Red State has a horror element to it, I don't know that I would classify it as a straight up horror movie. Red State was shot rather quickly and sadly, the rushed nature of the project shows.

Red State would have greatly benefitted from a few re-writes. There's good stuff in there and as I watched the film, I got a sense that Smith is a big fan of Eli Roth and Quentin Tarantino, but he lacks Roth's true zest for horror and Tarantino's ability to ring true tension out of the most talkie of scenes. Case in point, Parks' big character introduction has the freaky religious fundamentalist spouting off an extended monologue/sermon to a church full of followers. This scene reminded me a bit of Hans Landa's exchange with a dairy farmer in the first act of Quentin Tarantino's brilliant Inglorious Basterds, only in Smith's film, the scene doesn't really build. We know where the scene is going but a good six or seven minutes into Parks' monologue, I was ready for things to move on. Instead, the sermon went on... for another ten minutes! To Parks' great credit, the delivery is tremendous. I expected Red State to be Smith's lashing out at his religious extremist tormentors and while that's certainly in there, the auteur takes shots at folks of all walks of life in this film. The performances most worth noting in Red State are Parks-- who delivers a devilishly creepy villain--and Melissa Leo who takes a mere supporting character and breathes life into her. Many great character actors are squandered with underwritten roles (specifically Stephen Root and Kevin Pollack).

Perhaps my biggest gripe with Red State is the ending. Smith takes the proceedings in a direction that could have been offbeat and subversive, but instead, he turns this direction into a joke--complete with a Kevin Smith punch line. Its an excuse for Smith to delve into the sort of word play he feels comfortable with, but because Red State is supposed to be in a completely different universe, it sort of renders a lot of the movie ineffective. I get what Smith is trying to say here. He's saying extremism in any form is stupid. While that very well may be, by ending the film on this particular note, he's sort of become his own worst enemy. He's taken the horror out of the horror film. Having said all of this, as messy as Red State is, there's some really good stuff in there and had Smith taken his time, he might have delivered the great American heady-horror masterpiece he set out to make. In the end though, I just got a sense that Smith was a little more enthusiastic about getting the film out there than he was getting it in there.

Grade: C+