The teenager Jarod (Kyle Gallner) invites his best friends Travis (Michael Angarano) and Billy-Ray (Nicholas Braun) to have a foursome with a thirty-eight year-old woman. While driving to meet the woman, Travis hit a car parked on the road. When they meet the woman, she gives spiked beer to them and they faint. When the three friends wake-up, they find that they are trapped in the fundamentalist Five Points Trinity Church of the infamous Pastor Abin Cooper (Michael Parks) and that they will be killed. Meanwhile the church is under siege of ATF agents led by Agent Joseph Keenan (John Goodman) that have been ordered to destroy the terrorist cell. Will the teenagers be saved by the agents of the law enforcement agency?

"Red State" is a film by Kevin Smith with a promising beginning, but also a very disappointing conclusion. The indulgent Kevin Smith made a twist in his career in Hollywood and "Red State" had potential to be a great movie but unfortunately it becomes an incoherent and inconsistent mess in the end with Keenan sparing the life of Abin Cooper after killing Jarod and the girl Cheyenne. My vote is six.

Title (Brazil): "Seita Mortal" ("Mortal Sect")

For me, the main attraction was the cast. Tarantino regular Michael Parks, Melissa Leo who was excellent in The Fighter and John Goodman who's always fun to watch no matter how good or bad the project is. I haven't seen much of Kevin Smith's other work, but what I have seen has been decent, good even.

I wasn't expecting much from Red State, and while it was not a complete waste of time as there were much worse movies released this year, I didn't find the film particularly good either. I did like the camera work and editing, and the cast are great especially Parks and Goodman.

However, Red State is a very unevenly paced movie. The first half feels rather sluggish, and while the second half does pick up the predictable and anti-climatic ending stopped it from being any more than that.

The soundtrack was at best forgettable, and not always fitting with the tones of the film. Don't get me wrong, I love music, especially good and well used music, but here I just didn't think much of it.

Also not working were the script and story. The story mixes horror movie, action movie and social commentary, and unfortunately while somewhat interesting in hindsight these don't translate well on film, and the film suffers from awkwardly choreographed and unexciting action sequences and a lack of tension as a result.

Red State's script to me was full of lazy exposition and misplaced humour, while you could tell that Smith had stepped out of his comfort zone, judging by the clumsy mix of ideas he didn't always know what he was doing with this movie. Characterisation is kept at minimal, not always a bad thing, but for me it was in this case because I didn't get anything from any of the characters.

Overall, a great cast and decent enough technically, but a mess when it comes to the story and writing. 4/10 Bethany Cox

So, Kevin Smith decided to make a movie about religious nuts, heavily inspired by the misadventures of Westboro Baptist Church. The result is RED STATE, an episodic and frankly hacked-together movie that doesn't really know what it wants to be. While I can't fault his professional work as director here, what I can fault is his script, which is all over the place.

The first half of the film is a typical teenage horror/torture porn outing as a group of three guys (including FORBIDDEN KINGDOM's Michael Angarano) go looking for a good time and find something that's anything but. There's quite a bit of suspense, and the introduction of a fire-and-brimstone preacher - played to the hilt by Michael Parks - is both strong and effective. And then the film changes tack completely, turning into more of a action/thriller, and it just falls apart.

There's a huge set-piece siege scenario, which is well filmed, but it just kind of starts to fizzle out as the climax nears. Then, at the end, it turns into a huge anticlimactic talk-fest that's guaranteed to test the patience of even the most dedicated viewer. John Goodman is excellent value as an FBI agent but that's about all the second half of the film has to offer; this ends up as a huge disappointment and something written by somebody who didn't really have a clue what they were doing.