Red Handed is a 2019 thriller about three brothers who descend upon an Oregon mountain river to spread the ashes of their father, though another tragedy looms.
Pete (Owen Burke) is a national park ranger living in the woods, isolated, frustrated and haunted by something in his past. He is one of three brothers, the others Duffy (Christian Madsen) and Gus (Ryan Carnes), who don’t exactly get along. They come together after their father (Michael Madsen) is killed, taking the advice of his estranged brother Reynolds (Michael Biehn) to spread his ashes in an Oregon river. They travel – Duffy with his drug-abuse-recovering wife (Kenzie Dalton) and Gus with his ingenue model (Zoe Chait) – to the deep mountains to the large, secluded estate of their uncle, where things become entangled in a dark, ancient mystery, especially when Louie (Frank Peluso 3), Duffy’s young son goes missing.
Written and directed by Frank Peluso, this slow-paced potboiler centers on Pete, who was himself abducted as a child but can’t recall the details, surviving on his own with flashes of disturbing images and hazy memories of something cult-like. He has thoughts of being in an underground cubby, looking up through a grate in the floor where a young girl calls down to him. It is the first of a number of other oddities that lie about like a trail of breadcrumbs in connecting a story thirty years in the making.
It all begins with brief bit of reading on screen where we learn about the Canaanites and the slaughter of babies in the name of a demon named Moloch and the few children who were marked and left alive. This serves as the underlying plot behind the rest of the film, where it kicks off with the death of the boys’ father, who is lured into a potentially erotic encounter with the slutry Rachel (Caroline Vreeland), who instead traps him to his fate. She shows up later at the cabin in the mountains, part of the clan under Reynold’s fold of followers and we begin to see where one is part of the other.
Red Handed is not a typical horror film, despite the markings of such, instead putting most of its efforts in the mystery of it all as the past is repeated and a new generation faces a greater evil. It’s not entirely unfamiliar, the occult and demon worship a go-to trope in the genre, but at least Peluso (mostly) avoids the conventional jumpscares and boogeyman in the dark clichés that all too often crowd movies like this. This allows the story to be about what Pete recalls in his youth to serve as anchor points in figuring out what is happening now.
It’s not all that polished and can’t help but be limited by its low budget, but the filmmakers and most of the cast give this an earnest shot, with the three leads well cast and believable. Michael Madsen and Biehn are of course, not seen much and the film loses a bit of its traction as it slips further away from family bonds to that of the occult, but thankfully – almost in defiance of the genre – it stays grounded, never cheating its way to an end that you are convinced is coming, instead finding a deeper, more personal way to tie its threads together. Recommended.