DVD review: 'Red State'

“Silent Bob” makes some pretty loud and uncharacteristically frightening noise in his first outing as a writer and director of thrillers, and it’s pretty safe to assume that “Red State”

The man who brought us such hipster-geek comedies as “Clerks,” “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back” and “Zack and Miri Make a Porno” spins a tale of murderous hate and religious fanaticism that often borders on horror, with a level of graphic violence that makes Quentin Tarantino’s worst bloodbaths seem tame by comparison. But there’s method in Smith’s madness in this story that opens with three teenage boys being lured to the rural compound of a fundamentalist commune by a website invitation for sex with a mysterious woman.

The woman (Academy Award-winner Melissa Leo) turns out to be the willing bait in snaring the young “sinners” to satisfy the deadly moral agenda of Pastor Abin Cooper (Tarantino veteran Michael Parks), leader of the Five Points Trinity. It is Cooper’s practice during his bile-spewing sermons to punish people he views as human abominations — particularly gays — in shocking ways before the approving eyes of his congregation. But when a sheriff’s deputy shows up to investigate a hit-and-run collision, and an overzealous member of Cooper’s flock guns him down, ATF Special Agent Joseph Keenan (John Goodman) and his team are called in to brace the heavily armed Five Pointers, and things begin to go tragically wrong on both sides of the fence.