Green Room

Foreign world. Foreign crowd. Foreign building. You enter a crowded room backstage and spy a woman with a knife embedded in her skull; what do you do? These are situations in which insignificant people die and you’re as expendable as a third sock. This is the premise of the intense, hideous and very scary Green Room, a film which dares suggest that Neo-Nazis aren’t any more fun than the orginals. Seven decades later and you guys still want to fight, huh? Get in line. There’s a lot of that going around.

Punk band Ain’t Rights is all about the integrity – not grammatical integrity, mind you. Nor legal integrity, either — the band siphons petroleum with the frequency of Daniel-Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood. But artistic integrity? Oh, yeah, these punkers got it in spades. They don’t even like recording because the song has to be in the moment. These are tactics you must have if you intend never to own collectively more than the Mystery Machine. Following a truly depressing gig in which each band member netted $6 – I honestly felt sorry for the band at this point; I feel like inviting them to a birthday party. Which do you think 6-year-olds find more terrifying: clowns or thrash punk? –Never fear, Ain’t Rights, the disenfranchised teen reporter has Neo-Nazi cousin paying $350 for skin heads to mosh. Hmmm, hate skin heads, but a gig’s a gig; am I right?

Which brings us to the premise, where Sam (Alia Shawkat), Reece (Joe Cole), Tiger (Callum Turner) and Pat (Anton Yelchin) do a set, return to their dressing room to retrieve a cell phone and find headliner Kowkatcher prepares for gigs just a tad differently than most bands – or so I imagine.

I have no idea who Anton Yelchin’s agent is, but (Smurfs notwithstanding) he or she is pretty good at identifying a quality script. I’m not wild about Yelchin, but his résumé (Only Lovers Left Alive, Star Trek, Like Crazy, Charlie Bartlett, etc.) is impressive for a guy who leaves little imprint on the page.

Green Room gets raw fast. The establishment, an abandoned small canning factory, should have been condemned years ago and attracts exactly the types of people who flock to condemned properties. And their sole intent is containment; collateral damage is acceptable damage … suddenly “Ain’t Rights” is the perfect name to describe a situation that ain’t right or a group that ain’t got rights. Blood and makeshift weaponry will follow.

This film is exactly what The Purge ought to be – an experience in the terror of the lawless against the helpless. In just two ROYGBIV films (Green Room and Blue Ruin), writer/director Jeremy Saulnier has established himself as a master of isolation and caged desperation. You want legitimate horror? None of this zombie or Jason Vorhees crap, this is real life horror. Green Room is grisly, dirty, and scary, yet eerily realistic in its own way.  Much as I loved this film, it’s the kind of celluloid experience that makes you want to take a hot shower afterwards … or get a tetanus shot.  Hence, I cannot really recommend this film to anybody who isn’t me, but for those of me out there – this thing rocked.

♪Those punks have got their rage keen
Witness stumbles that scene
Place becomes death machine
Blitzkrieg Stomp

Ain’t no one goin’ home alive
Stuck inside a bee hive
Shouldda swapped punk for jive
Blitzkrieg Stomp♫

Rated R, 95 Minutes
D: Jeremy Saulnier
W: Jeremy Saulnier
Genre: Get out!
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Bands with integrity [read: penniless]
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Neo-Nazis

♪ Parody inspired by “Blitzkrieg Bop”