Red State

I have always made no lie of my irrevocable repellence towards fatty fanboy filmmaker Kevin Smith and his fecal-fuming films. I don’t know about most people but I find Smith’s adolescent cinematic contemplations on romance-gone-wrong and prepubescent sex jokes to be nothing more than symbiotic of the white-man-child epidemic that has plagued America for the past two decades or so. After all, if any film director (and I use this word loosely for the mere convenience) epitomizes the thoroughly emasculated American white male, it is Kevin Smith; the pudgy comic book super-nerd-nerd-enabler whose generous sized bitch tits would undoubtedly put prematurely deceased Baltimoron Divine's man-mammary-glands to shame. When I found out that Smith directed a horror movie, I couldn’t think of a more appalling prospect for a film. After all, it is no secret that most horror films suffer from poorly written dialogue but a horror flick with dialogue dreamed up by Kevin Smith could only bring further shame to the seemingly shameless genre. Smith’s horror film is entitled Red State and as one would expect from the title, it is also of a blatantly political nature. Indeed, just by knowing the synopsis of the film and the mental-eunuch man behind it, one can assume that Red State is arguably one of the worst ideas for a film ever. After his recent fallout with brothers Weinstein and a number of cinematic abortions over the past decade or so, one can only assume that Red State is a work of desperation created by a one-trick pussy filmmaker whose artistic impotence and lack of passionate vision is only rivaled by his lack of testosterone. Unsurprisingly, I found Red State to be not only the worst film I have seen all year but also Smith’s most lackluster attempt at assembling something resembling a feature-length film.

Despite Kevin Smith’s assurance that Red State would feature nil of the preschool-potty-mouth humor that permeates throughout his work; the plot of the film is essentially a propaganda piece for such repugnant and sexually immature themes and unsurprisingly features them as well. In the film, a trio of toddler-like teenage turdlings travel to a stereotypically bigoted rural county so they can gang-bang a milf that one of the boys met on a sex website. Of course, the three friends travel under a false pretense and fall prey to a militant Judeo-Christian family church modeled after real-life pastor Fred “I hate fags” Phelps’s infamous church. Todd McCarthy of the Hollywood Reporter described Red States as, "A potent cinematic hand grenade tossed to bigots everywhere” yet the film itself is a flaccid work of atheistic intolerance with anti-Southern and anti-Christian stereotypes that are so predictable that it is essentially an unintentional parody of typical liberal Hollywood parodies. I don’t know whether or not God hates fags but he most certainly hates bovine fanboy filmmakers as the mediocrity of Red State attests to. Ironically and hypocritically, Kevin Smith modeled his self-distribution of Red State after Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ (2004). Unlike Gibson’s film, Red State lacks brutal carnality and an apt atmosphere; two imperative ingredients one expects from quality horror films. Instead, Red State seems to be merely an outlet for Kevin Smith’s seething hatred and fear of rural America, the Second Amendment, masculinity, tradition, Christianity, and any other individual or institution that upholds conservative values. Of course, if Smith had substituted the white Christian fundamentalists with Jewish or Islamic fundamentalists of a similar nature; he would have been branded a bigoted spreader of hate and thrown his career into an abyss much deeper than where it has already fallen.

Indeed, not even the wonderfully obnoxious charisma of celebrated character actor John Goodman could save the genre-confused and half-inseminated cinematic conception that is Red State. Various supporting cast members of the surprisingly entertaining TV series Breaking Bad are also completely wasted in the film. Michael Angarano (Lords of Dogtown, Black Irish), who played the lead protagonist in Red State, was also unable to give anything resembling a memorable acting performance; no doubt due to Kevin Smith’s incompetence as a writer and director who has yet to graduate onto the maturity of a young adult. Of course, childish fantasies can make for brilliant films (e.g. the early works of Terry Gilliam and Tim Burton) yet Smith’s fantasies, at best, seem to be wholly and soullessly contrived and merely an outlet for his stereotypically Hollywood liberal political agenda. If it weren’t for the popular political views preached by schoolyard antichrist Kevin Smith, it would be hard for anyone to be able to revere Red State as anything more than an uninspired work of postmodern trash that falls miles below the films of Tarantino, Rob Zombie, and every other obscenely overrated fanboy would-be-auteur filmmaker. Red State is so thematically and aesthetically redundant and clinically cliché in its political agenda that it is the kind of work that will most likely make even the most faithful of libertine atheists and agnostics question the self-righteous dehumanization of the Christian "other."  Suffice to say, Red State has more liberal dogma than Smith’s earlier effort Dogma (1999) and less genuine horror than Chasing Amy (1997). If one can learn anything by watching Red State, it is that the mainstream left is more intellectually bankrupt than the most inbred of Southern Baptist preachers. Maybe if Kevin Smith were to have studied the work of Luis Buñuel instead of jerking off to overpriced comic books, he would have learned a couple tricks in regard to nuance and subtlety in his execution of Red State. As a film, Red State has nothing to offer to even the least demanding of horror fans. I hate to say it but maybe Kevin Smith might want to consider giving his tiresome soul back to the Weinstein bros. because at least then he would be able to make the sort of whiny beta-male garbage that made him the holy patron saint of feeble and rotund white male virgins. 

-Ty E