Kevin Smith’s ‘Red State’ bleeds on Cobb Energy Centre

• SModcast Pictures

Oscar Wilde said, “A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies.” Kevin Smith had a stroke of genius in picking a fight with the Phelps family as the thinly-disguised villains in his new film Red State. As members of the Westboro Baptist Church, the Phelps clan pickets funerals of U.S. soldiers and victims of gay-bashing, with notoriously homophobic placards of the “God hates fags” variety. As a homily-spouting schoolteacher says of Red State’s fictional Cooper family, “Even the Nazis think they’re nucking futs.” The real-life Phelps provide Smith with free publicity every time they stage a public protest of the film, while Smith delightedly holds them up to ridicule, as he did with the funny live warm-up to the film at the Cobb Energy Centre last night.

Screening around the country as part of the “Red State USA” tour (in advance of a release at more traditional venues in October), the film suggests what Kevin Smith would have made had Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez asked him to contribute to Grindhouse. Initially Red State revels in evoking the texture of a 1970s horror-exploitation flick, with ominous early scenes in a small rural town suggesting the early work of John Carpenter. Three none-too-bring high-school buddies use social networking to locate a horny, willing MILF a few towns over, so like the sex tourists in a Hostel film, the snickering trio blunders into a potentially deadly honeypot.