Frankly, Red State is all over the map as well, but for the first time in a long time, the man behind the camera seems completely dialed in to what's happening in front of it. Working outside of his preferred genre -- the raunchy slacker comedy -- forces Smith to abandon most of his usual habits, from his point-and-shoot camerawork (he relies on a close-up heavy handheld shooting style instead) to the endless pages of back-and-forth repartee laced with Star Wars references. As a filmmaker, he's making interesting creative decisions and taking real risks and even though the finished product is far from perfect, it's invigorating to watch him try and fail as well as succeed.

One of the principal reasons Red State doesn't entirely hold together is that it's at least three different movies in one, with the tone and mood changing after every act break. The film opens as a kind of ribald sex comedy, with a trio of high school punks (Michael Angarano, Nicholas Braun and Kyle Gallner) journeying to a trailer on the outskirts of their small red state town to congress with a prostitute (Melissa Leo) they found on the Internet. Instead, it turns out that this sex solicitor is actually a member of the Five Points Trinity Church, a virulently anti-gay group led by fiery preacher Abin Cooper (Michael Parks). The boys are drugged, kidnapped, and chained up in the basement of Cooper's compound, where they learn they're about to be literally sacrificed on the church's alter. In the congregations twisted worldview, this will satisfy God's fury at the sinners that inhabit the world he created and, more practically, it will give the group more funerals to picket and spew their hate-filled message.

Before they're offered up for slaughter, two of the kids manage to free themselves and make a run for it. At the same time though, the local police force shows up on and is fired upon by a trigger happy member of Cooper's flock. At this point, Red State shifts gears one more time and becomes a siege picture, with the Five Points congregants squaring off against the army of federal agents that has assembled outside their walls. These troops are led by ATF agent Joseph Keenan (John Goodman), who discovers during the course of the operation that his government supervisors expect him to make certain that none of the churchgoers emerge from the compound alive.

As social commentary, Red State is often at cross-purposes with itself. While Cooper is obviously the primary villain of the piece, Smith muddies the waters by straining to equate his hypocrisy and ugly beliefs with a trigger-happy government agency that would rather kill potentially innocent citizens (including children) than rescue them. The parallels to the infamous Waco stand-off are obvious, but the situation and characters are drawn too simplistically here to really invite comparisons to that incident. Even though Parks is magnetic when imparting the twisted beliefs that Smith has penned for him, Cooper remains something of a cartoon -- a boogeyman representing the most extreme form of Christian fundamentalism. On the opposite side of the spectrum, you have Goodman's Keenan, a government stooge who inevitably puts his orders ahead of his morality. It's admirable that the film wants to make us peer beyond black and white into shades of grey, but there's little complexity -- to say nothing of humanity -- in the people onscreen. At times, Red State feels like something written by a nihilistic teenager who believes that everyone in the world sucks and the only proper response to those around you is fear, distrust and anger.

Judged purely as a thriller though, Red State can be gripping stuff. Smith makes it clear early on that none of the characters are safe and the body count grows as the movie goes along, including several deaths that you probably won't see coming. Smith's action choreography certainly won't earn comparisons to masters like John Woo or James Cameron, but he handles the siege portion of the film well. More than anything, the final act recalls one of George A. Romero's zombie movies, where the intensity and relentless pace of the violence helps distract from the production's obviously limited resources. There are also some intensely dramatic moments to be found here, most memorably a sequence in which one of the kidnapped boys/sacrificial lambs confronts Cooper's teen daughter Cheyenne in her bedroom. (Cheyenne is played by newcomer Kerry Bishé and she gives what's probably the movie's most nuanced, and certainly most human, performance.) If Red State really is Smith's penultimate feature film -- as the famously talkative director has gone blue in the face repeating -- at least he'll approach the end of this chapter of his career having made a movie that challenges his skills instead of allowing them to further atrophy.

Red State will be available on most VOD platforms for the next six weeks, followed by a DVD release on October 18. Check the film's official website for information on its theatrical screening schedule.

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