Movie Info
Movie Name: Green Room
Studio: Broad Green Pictures
Genre(s): Mystery/Suspense/Horror
Release Date(s): May 17, 2015 (Cannes Film Festival)/April 15, 2016 (US)
MPAA Rating: R
Hey good idea…let’s taunt the Nazi Skinheads!
The Ain’t Rights is a punk band nearing the end of a tour. They don’t believe in self-promotion and they get by syphoning gas and picking up jobs when they can. When they get a job near Portland, the price is right but the bar is a hang-out for Neo-Nazis. When the group accidentally sees a murder, a deadly stand-off begins between the band and the bar owner Darcy (Patrick Stewart) and his men.
Written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, Green Room is a horror-thriller. The film was initially released at Cannes in 2015 and received a United States release in 2016. The film was released to positive reviews.
I’m beginning to hate punk bands…
I liked Blue Ruin. It was dark and brutal and showed that Saulnier had great potential as a director. I approached Green Room a bit hesitantly since lightning doesn’t always strike twice…it did here.
The movie is in many ways a grindhouse picture. It receives a lot of comparisons to Assault on Precinct 13 (with the standoff aspect), but I also think it is a bit like Return of the Living Dead…except replace the zombies with skinheads. It is a battle to the death and it is one of those movies where you really don’t know who will survive.
How do you like your cool hipster life now?
The movie’s format is basically take all the basic horror survival tropes and reverse them. If you think a person has a clue, an escape route is available, or someone is going to survive, it basically doesn’t happen. The only problem with this is that it too reversed and you can almost predict the twist reversals by the end of the film.
Patrick Stewart plays a bit of a toned down role as the “villain” of the movie. His could have had a bigger role, but probably works best in this smaller dose. The real “stars” are the band who are fighting for survival. Anton Yelchin plays the badly maimed Pat, and Imogen Poots is the group’s unlikely ally Amber. Arrested Development’s Alia Shawkat plays the band’s lone female member, but Macon Blair is also good as Stewart’s second hand.
So do you think we’re going to get paid?
The movie looks great. It is dirty and gritty like a grindhouse, but it has a lot of skill and style. The Northwest setting provides a nice contrast for all the confined scenes when the characters are out in the world and the forests.
Green Room is good, but it also has a few issues for me. I kind of hated all the characters and wasn’t quite sure if we were supposed to think they were obnoxious or so desperately hip. I almost had the feeling we were supposed to think they were cool. I know through the whole “Desert Island Band” theme we were supposed to see them as they truly were…but still, for most of them, I welcomed their death and was rooting for Stewart’s racist men.
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