Red State - Kevin Smith makes another mad film

What an utterly mental film this is - in a good way. Red State is another Kevin Smith film in which he explores the madness inherent in taking dogmatic religious adherence to its illogical conclusion. Here the film's title alludes to the conservative deep south of the USA, those states that since the civil rights movement in the 1960s have always voted republican - i.e. the Red States. It is here that the outlandish excesses of America's right wing Christan zealots are often manifested, and as such it's the perfect breeding ground for the story that Smith wants to tell.

The story is of a preacher named Abin Cooper, and his Five Points Trinity Church, which engages in the practise of advertising on line to entice young men into having sexual encounters with a local promiscuous woman. Sadly for these young lads, the local woman is a member of Cooper's congregation, and instead of sex all they get is drugged up and chained up at the church waiting to be judged. Luckily (at least in the short term) for them, they accidentally hit the local sheriff's car earlier in the day, and so the police are on their case. Before long the FBI are on the scene (in the form of John Goodman) and a full scale Waco-style siege is underway.  These FBI aren't all good guys though!

This is an 18 - so be prepared for some chillingly gruesome deaths. This is also a Kevin Smith film, so be prepared for him not giving a crap about killing off characters and playing around with the usual conventions of film. The ending of the film is nothing if not wacky. Basically everyone's an idiot and ends up doing something stupid, mostly for blackly comic effect. The film has a nice false ending and then a bizarre epilogue with a final line that sums it all up as the tongue-in-cheek lark it really is.

I've come up with a new rule of thumbs for watching films, which is that if a film is less than about 90 minutes long I'm prepared to be a lot more forgiving than if it were overly long. If Red State were longer it would end up becoming tedious. At 88 minutes it's just the right length for creating a bonkers world solely for the purposes of dark comedy, without anyone worrying about all the bits holding together. Thoroughly enjoyable.