Brutal, Blood-Soaked Battle: Punk Rockers vs Neo-Nazis

Rating: 7/10 (15 June 2017)

I was sold on GREEN ROOM the moment I found out Patrick Stewart is the villain. Not just any villain either, but the head of an organization of rural neo- Nazis. And, to keep the STAR TREK connections flowing, he and his skinheads are going up against a punk band in which the lead guitarist is played by Anton Yelchin who played the young Pavel Chekov in the 2009 reboot and onward. Then GREEN ROOM went on to earn a certified fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes and I was excited. I love a good genre film and GREEN ROOM is a horror/thriller that will effectively keep you on edge. The film focuses on a small-time punk band called the Ain't Rights as they're coming to the end of a cross-country tour. They're a handful of die-hards in it for the music and embracing the struggle, driving all hours and siphoning gas because these gigs aren't paying the greatest. As the movie begins, they find themselves in the Pacific northwest when a promised gig proves to be a bust. Just as they're about ready to call it done and start the long ride home, their local contact promises them a better venue and the chance for some decent cash. The only downside: they're playing to skinheads. Just keep it cool and don't play anything that'll set them off, and it'll be fine. The gig, at a private bar in the middle of the Oregon wilderness, goes well enough, but one wrong move on their way out ensures they won't be allowed to leave alive.
The band finds themselves trapped in the skinhead bar's green room with the owner (Stewart) at first trying to reassure them that everything will be fine, the police are on the way, and soon this whole ordeal will be sorted out. Meanwhile, the neo-Nazis have a secret to protect on this property and that means these scrawny rockers can't be allowed to ruin their operation. What follows is a brutally violent battle of punks vs. Nazis where the Ain't Rights are going to have to force themselves out of their comfort zones and face death head-on if they plan on seeing their way out of there. The band consists of Yelchin with Alia Shawkat, and relative unknowns (to me) Joe Cole and Callum Turner. It's the band that sells it and makes this movie, at times, pretty painful to watch. They give the band a grounded realism as your average aimless youths with nothing more in mind than getting drunk and playing their music So when these stone-cold killers come at them armed with machetes and trained attack dogs, they react with a very real panic. These characters aren't action heroes. They're still practically kids and this is a very real danger for them. So, when they get the nerve to finally try and turn the tables on their enemies, it's sloppy and often ineffective, and when people start to die it provokes a gut reaction, unlike a lot of other slasher films out there where you're too detached to care about the heroes.
It's a treat to see Patrick Stewart as the villain, especially one as horrible as this. His character, Darcy, is the head of this operation and storms on to the scene once his lieutenants alert him to the problem of a pesky corpse and the police having been called to the scene. He operates with composure and he's got a plan to make sure all of this goes away before it can destroy everything he's worked to build. He's soft-spoken, though that may just be because Stewart's slight southern drawl barely conceals his underlying English accent, but the character's realize early on that he's not your average gentle old man. Adding to the sickly feeling of uneasiness in the film is the sharp cinematography of Sean Porter. The whole movie has a dim, overcast feel evocative of the rainy northwest (whether that was a decision or just a result of filming in Oregon, I don't know but it works) and, of course, the movie has a greenish hue due in part to the use of fluorescent lighting in the bar and the rich greens of the surrounding Oregon forest. It works in conjunction with the film's grimy characters and bloody violence to give GREEN ROOM the nightmarish quality it needs to put your in the minds of these innocent punks who've been dumped in the worst case scenario and might not live to see the sunrise.