Yes yes, it's another film where IMDB lists its year of release as 2015, but Green Room didn't get released here in the UK at least until May 2016. Add to that the fact that it came out just a few weeks before lead actor Anton Yelchin's tragic death, and it really is a travesty that it's taken me this long to finally get around to seeing it.
The Ain't Rights - Pat, Sam, Tiger and Reece - are a down-on-their-luck punk band touring and living out of their van in the Pacific Northwest. A contact of theirs sets them up with a paying gig in the area. It's a Neo-Nazi bar, but they really need the money so they play there any way (and even manage to have a little fun with a certain Dead Kennedys cover). Unfortunately, upon returning to the green room after their set, they happen to walk in on the aftermath of a murder, the victim still on the ground with a knife in her head and everything. The Neo-Nazis, of course, can't just let them leave after they see that and so they lock them in the green room whilst they work out what to do with them. The Ain't Rights end up having to fight for their lives against a club full of Neo-Nazis and their sinister leader Darcy...
I'm taking a short break from my Handmade Christmas Gift Death March for this movie, and I'm very glad that I did. Green Room is from still-relatively-new director Jeremy Saulnier, whose previous films include Murder Party and Blue Ruin. Saulnier himself refers to these three films as his "Inept Protagonist" trilogy, and while I haven't seen his previous two films I can attest to that description being an accurate one for Green Room, as of the five protagonists who end up trapped in the titular green room (the four band members and another girl), only two of them have even the faintest idea of how to fight/and or defend themselves, while the others tend to run around aimlessly and make rather bad decisions (throwing their weapons, for example, or in one case spraying an assailant with the contents of a fire extinguisher instead of using it as a bludgeoning weapon), and of course some of those bad decisions just make things worse for them. It all makes it easier for the audience to identify with the protagonists as, however much we might think otherwise as we sit here and watch these films, in reality, most of us would likely not know what to do in situations like these either. Of course, it's not entirely necessary as it's not exactly difficult to be sympathetic to the protagonists when they're up against Nazis.
I think this is one of the few horror movies I've seen where the antagonists are Nazis but not zombie Nazis, which seemed notable to me until I remembered that the Nazisploitation subgenre exists. Still, it's very easy to hate Nazis no matter how they're portrayed, and the ones in Green Room are no exception as they're racist, murdering drug dealers almost to a man. But it's their leader Darcy who really stands out. Played by none other than Sir Patrick Stewart, when he first appears he's wearing a green waxed jacket and a flat cap - the very image of a country gamekeeper or gentleman. And then he calmly, even genially, goes about organising multiple murders. I don't think he even raises his voice all that much throughout the entire film, and hearing Captain Picard/Professor Xavier (use your preferred character here) casually using racial epithets is very jarring indeed. Stewart said that he wanted to play Darcy because he felt it would be a good challenge for him to play someone so against his usual type, and I would say that he more than meets that challenge.
The late Anton Yelchin also impresses as the hapless Pat, who finds himself the defacto leader of the group and having to make-life-or-death decisions for all of them once things go south - and as I said above, not all of these decisions are the best (more of the "inept protagonist" concept). He also suffers some pretty horrific injuries during the course of the film as well, and reacts to these much as any normal person would - ie. he screams a lot and goes into shock. You really feel for his character and everything he goes through.
Green Room has been described as an "ultra-violent" movie, and while it's not on the level of, say, Robocop, Battle Royale or the Hostel movies, when violence and gore do occur it's memorable because it's realistic. People get savaged by fighting dogs (no dogs die during the film), blasted with shotguns, stabbed and beaten and the grim reality of it all makes it worse than, to take one of my above examples, the almost over-the-top blood sprays of Robocop. They're human injuries, the kind that makes us wince in sympathy as we watch them because we can imagine how that might actually feel, and I think that helps to raise Green Room above the average violent horror movie. In the end, Green Room is definitely worth watching, even if you just want to see Sir Patrick Stewart playing a Nazi with chilling aplomb.
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