Avis Metacritic

Red State is as profane and anti-establishment as any of his other films, but the stakes are infinitely higher this time: This Kevin Smith movie has an astonishing body count.

Red State is gloriously unencumbered by fidelity to genre conventions, which lends it a thrilling element of unpredictability even when the action frequently grows shrill and heavy-handed.

Red State is cleverly contrarian enough to get a rise out of almost any audience.

This is one of those movies that's "interesting" rather than ˜"good". Smith has so much solid material to deliver that it's a shame the package is so sloppily wrapped.

For all its boisterous profanity and splattery violence, the film is more of a weary sigh than a sputtering volley of indignation.

It's a charming if conspicuously unfinished film, a half-riotous, half-idiotic send-up of the teen horror genre with a vaguely hip political twist.

This sloppily constructed horror-thriller lacks the satirical bite and action chops to skewer extreme-right-wing zealots with the gusto Smith clearly feels they deserve, instead evincing the verbal incontinence and slack tension that have long dogged the writer-director's work.

Smith isn't up to doing anything other than setting up caricatures and then knocking them down.

Ugly characterizations and simplistic preachiness negate the terror in Red State - a film that eventually proves horrific in ways unintended by writer/director Kevin Smith.