Red State - Blu-ray Review

'the second half of Red State moves from Horror into solid B-movie Thriller territory, of the sort you might find Kevin Pollak featuring in nowadays'

Consider Red State's pitch and what should emerge to most film fans is a concept with a lot of promise. Red State is a Horror/Thriller from Kevin Smith, a vociferous director, which takes aim at ultra-conservative Christians, the Government and The World We Live In, to name but three. It's a fairly timely idea, which should stir up some degree of controversy whilst having plenty of material available in the background to mean Smith crafts his film to say something important, so lacking in some of his more recent efforts.

The resultant film takes its genre split rather literally. The first, more successful half, sees three likely lads (one of whom sports the worst haircut this side of the 1970s) kidnapped by Abin Cooper's (Michael Parks) Five Points Church and subjected to some degree of unpleasantness. This half, whilst tense and occasionally troubling, fails to deliver on the 'ultra-violence' Smith apparently promised but, non-the-less, is a fairly functional stab at kidnap horror, and the background segments showcasing Cooper's beliefs are effective.

The second half of Red State moves from Horror into solid B-movie Thriller territory, of the sort you might find Kevin Pollak featuring in nowadays. The film is low-budget, much publicised by Smith, something which shows much more in these segments, where a group of ATF agents seem to be invading your common or garden backyard. There is a way to shoot such small-scale engagements as if they are big budget spectacles but Smith never captures it correctly and the whole thing feels cheap and tacky, spending far too long showing a variety of un-interesting people shooting various automatic weapons aimlessly out of windows.

The whole that these two halves create is one which ultimately feels uneven, the film apparently abandoning its Horror pretensions halfway. Thematically too, there's plenty of real-life material here to mine and Smith could have hit back at critics of Cop Out by producing a well-made, visceral, treatise on the current climate, which shocked and/or awed in equal measure. Instead, he cuts away from more than one death, struggles to say anything new concerning ultra-conservatism and ends the whole thing with a kind of absurd wink towards the Government paranoia brigade.

Smith's return to material written by his own hand should have had horns sounding in triumph but instead misses more than half of what it aims for. The script only crackles very occasionally, the horror is fairly tame and the resultant location for Red State will, sadly, probably be somewhere in a bargain bin, lodged between any direct-to-DVD Horror you care to mention and the latest action-fest from Steven Segal. A sad state of affairs for an idea with so much to give.

Red State is released on DVD and Blu-ray in the UK on Monday 23rd January.

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'there’s an inordinate amount of shooting to be had and just not enough horror or scares to back it all up' - Cut The Crap Movie Reviews, 5/10