Red State

This is Kevin Smith's most important movie, at least for me. I went to go see the road show when it went to Austin. It was such a fun show. Kevin Smith answering questions, funny as always. I chickened out of asking any questions, what can I say, I was a punk back then. Maybe still am a bit.

But as fun as the movie was, the night after was one of the funnest of my life. I even wrote a movie about it. But if you want to know what happened now, you can listen to the pod where me and Saul talk about it.

Wow that audio needs to be cleaned up. Anyways, that is my personal reasoning for loving the movie so much. Now let us jump to the movie itself.

We start on protests for the funeral of a gay kid. In the movie the are called the five points Trinity church and their leader is a pastor named Abin Cooper. Anyone who watches the news knows that they are based off of the Westboro Baptist Church and their batshit crazy leader Fred Phelps.

Our story starts off being about three friends who live in that town and meet a girl online who wants to have sex, but only with all three of them at the same time. The three friends go to her house. Now I love my homeboys, I do. But I would never have a threesome or in this case a foursome with them. That is just too weird for my taste. I'm boring.

On the way to her house they accidentally hit the sheriff's car but he couldn't stop them, because he was busy, cheating on his wife with some guy. He sends one of his deputies to go find them. The deputy isn't happy, he was already off the clock.

 The three friends finish beers she gave them and they pass out. It turns out that she drugged them.  One of the friends wakes up to find himself in the Five Points Trinity Church as Abin Cooper is talking. The kid is scared out of his mind. Michael Parks as Cooper is terrifying. That man is such a great actor.

So while one of the kids is locked in the cage a man is tied to the cross. Cooper gives a sermon about the evils of homosexuality and shoots the guy in the head, dropping him into a hole with the other two kids. The kid from the cage is now being tied up to be killed. These people are sick. Like really really sick.

The other two friends start to try and escape as the lid on the basement. They saw their friend about to die and are scared out of their mind. Who can blame them?

The deputy shows up at the church and spots the car that he is looking for. Cooper blames his granddaughter and tries to talk the deputy into leaving. While inside he two kids escape but Ralph Garman goes after them. One of the kids gets a gun and fires, hitting Ralph Garman and getting himself. The deputy hears and calls it in but then gets shot. The Sheriff is now alone and Copper tells the Sheriff that he has pictures of him with another man. He blackmails him.

Enter John Goodman. He gets a call in the middle of the night asking about the Five Point Trinity Church. Back at the church they think that two of the kids were killed in the shooting, but one of them was just faking. He makes a run for it. Phelps is even mentioned in this film, as a way to state that Cooper isn't Phelps. Goodman is sent to deal with Cooper.

The kid who faked his death makes a run for it while his friend watches on tied to the cross. The love of Irony, the sheriff shot the kid trying to escape. Goodman tears him a new one as he takes over the situation. Goodman's second in command is shot in the head by Cooper. A firefight starts as Goodman talks to his boss. They want him to go into the church but Goodman is fighting and demands in writing that he and his men have order. He demands it in text or email. They want everyone in the building to be killed.

One of the girls makes it out and asks for help escaping. They order her dead. The man who she surrendered to ordered her back to the house but she wouldn't go but her mother shot him and forced her back into the house. These people are crazy.

The last of the three friends ends up in a room with the girl who tried to escape. She has a gun on him and is asking for help. He is having a hard time agreeing to help one of these people. She points out that the Feds will kill him to and lump him in with the rest of them. He tells her to just kill him, because they tied him to a cross to die. Why would he trust any of them. Her mother storms into the room and attacks the boy, her daughter shoots her and saves his life. She didn't mean too, the two of them fought over the gun and it went off.

She orders all the other little kids to go into the attic and not to open it for anyone, no matter what. The firefight starts to heat up. The Sheriff is killed while hiding in his car. The girl and escaped prisoner make it out of the house and try and talk Goodman out of doing all of this. Tells him about the babies in the attic and everything. The agent who was against this to begin with kills them both just as a giant bullhorn sounds.

Cooper and his family drop their weapons thinking that it is God calling about the end times. It turns out that it wasn't. That the horn blasts were neighbors just messing with the Coopers as payback. We find out that Cooper will spend the rest of his life in jail without so much as a trial. A sad testimony for how far our country has fallen. Even an evil sick freak like him deserves his day in court, because what if the next guy is innocent? It is a slippery slope that once we take rights away from some people we lose rights for all.

Goodman says at the end of the film that people do the craziest things when they feel entitled and I think that perfectly sums up modern America. Something that we as a people need to change before it is too late.