Red State is definitely one of the best films from Kevin Smith, perhaps even his best one. It's an exploitation flick using the Westboro Baptist Church as the basis for its plot.
The premise is that a fundamentalist cult run by the brilliant Michael Parks, kidnaps a group of teenagers to punish them for their heathen ways. There are also shades of the Waco massacre thrown in here as well when the FBI descends upon the cults home in a bid to free the captives, or so it would seem.
It's a clever satire and has a lot of interesting and unique elements, for example it is completely unpredictable as to who will live or die and the deaths shown here are nasty and abrupt, as they would be in real life.
My only criticism is that the ending was anticlimactic considering what Smith originally had in mind, in my opinion the ending he wanted to go with , but couldn't due to the budgetary restraints he was working with was the perfect ending for the film and it shows. The entire third act is building towards that ending and you can tell he had to alter the script to work around his low budget.
The ending we end up with works but if he was able to go full Dogma at the end it would have been a better film.
Overall though I think this film is absolutely worth watching, if only for Michael Park's amazing performance.
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