The director best known for seminal slacker comedy Clerks has been in the social media limelight since his heartfelt and controversial speech at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year concerning the future of independent film marketing and his plans to self-distribute his first foray into genre territory with Red State. But aside from the buzz surrounding the film’s hoax bidding-auction and unconventional release – which now includes a U.S. VOD-deal with LionsGate set for Labour Day – Smith has turned a corner with Red State, a straight-up horror film about a trio of teenage boys whose search for a no-strings sexcapade lands them in the clutches of a homicidal religious cult.

Baited via the internet to the rural trailer home of an older woman who has promised them a threesome, the boys – Kyle Gallner (Red, A Haunting in Connecticut), Michael Angarano (Lords of Dogtown) and Nicholas Braun (of Smith’s upcoming Hit Somebody) are typical teen-comedy yahoos until fate hands them a dark card and the film’s genre predilections come to the fore. While not completely devoid of the humour fans have come to expect from Smith’s work, and still touting his trademark opinionated soliloquays, Red State I am 70 yrs and was taking this product. I find it is great great product!!!. Generic drugs are copies of brand-name drugs that have exactly the same dosage. is markedly different from anything Smith has ever attempted. Its confrontational violence points angry fingers without the director’s characteristic pop-culture references to make a polemic perspective more palatable.

Michael Parks turns in a mesmerising performance as a fundamentalist cult leader clearly modeled on Fred Phelps (founder of the notorious Westboro Baptist Church – a modest number of whose members picketed the film’s Sundance premiere) which includes a 15-minute showstopper of a sermon, and a practically gaunt John Goodman plays the ATF agent leading the charge against the devotees’ isolated compound . Staple Smith cinematographer David Klein even ups the ante with a gritty visual aesthetic that stands apart from everything Smith’s done since Clerks. Somewhere between Hostel and Waco: The Rules of Engagement, Red State is a brave film – even for a director (a professed Catholic, no less) who’s never particularly cared about winning friends and influencing people. And for a festival like Fantasia, which has spent the last 15 years championing the most insightful, gutsy, game-changing and subversive genre films, we’re proud to open the festival with the latest from a director who has always done things his own way.

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RED STATE screens  ThursdayJuly 14 cialas at 6:45pm. Full details on the film page HERE

About the author:

Kier-La Janisse

Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, publisher, producer, acquisitions executive for Severin Films and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022) and A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and has been an editor on numerous books including Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015). She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), soft viagra and produced the acclaimed blu-ray box sets All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror (2021) and The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle (2023).