Green Room

In Green Room, a punk band is down on its luck.  The four member ensemble has been stiffed at a show for which it traveled cross-country to Eugene, Oregon.  A kid with an aggressive Mohawk says that he has a cousin, a friend of friend, who owns a bar about 80 miles away, apparently in the middle of nowhere.  Some kind of White Supremacist festival is under way for which skinhead bands are providing the musical soundtrack..  The punk band is offered $350 to play a gig for the neo-Nazis -- it's enough money for them to buy gas to get back home and, so, they travel to the bar, a compound of ramshackle huts and bunkers in the wilderness.  The band plays a gig intentionally provocative to the mob of surly-looking, all male reprobates gathered for the show -- for instance, they do a cover of "Nazi Punks Fuck Off" by the Dead Kennedy's.   After their show, the band withdraws to the titular green room where they discover that a girl is lying dead on the floor with an ice-pick stuck in her temple.  A big heavily tattooed bouncer seems to have killed her for reasons that are unclear.  The band members are frightened and demand that the police be called.  Sure enough, the cops arrive to deal with a stabbing.  But when they get to the compound, the bad guys have arranged for two skin-head junkies to stab themselves.  The cops leave with the slightly wounded skinheads and, then, the bar owner, played against type by a thuggish Patrick Stewart, sets to work hunting down and eliminating the members of the band.  Crowds of skin-heads attack the band members, sometimes siccing mean German shepherds on them.  People get arms and legs broken so that bones protrude through their flesh and there are various knifing, hackings with machetes, beatings with baseball bats, shootings, and the like.  After a suspenseful stand-off, most of the band members are killed, but the plucky lead singer recruits some disenfranchised punk-rockers from the audience, arms them, and, after a couple dozen additional homicides, all ends well.  One of the band members is still alive, although his hideous gash wounds have been repaired by duct-tape, and will probably require some extensive reconstructive surgery.  A bunch of pit bulls and German shepherds have been slaughtered.  And a tough Goth girl is also still around to tell the story.

Green Room is reasonably well acted and has some appealing characters.  Someone named Anton Yelcher who recently died in a humiliating park-to-reverse car accident plays the hero -- he's engaging in a gloomy, nihilistic sort of way.  The movie has a dusk-to-dawn ambience and is shot in nauseating green gloom -- this means that most of the action sequence are just frenetically editing squabbles among vaguely glimpsed shadows.  The director Jeremy Saulnier is good at despair and hopelessness but not too effective with anything else.  His villains are a featureless mob of disposable skinheads led by the incomprehensibly articulate and charismatic Patrick Stewart -- what he's doing with surly mob of tattoo-covered neo-Nazis is never established.  The scenes involving attack dogs are particularly idiotic -- Saulnier has no idea how to stage these shots and so he simply cuts together all sorts of writhing in almost pitch-dark with close-ups of a dog's nose and muzzle.  (The two dogs look mostly cheerful and avuncular -- they are Brownie and Grimm.)  The movie is relentlessly pure -- it cleaves close to its violent premise without digression.  But it's not really exciting and doesn't have the snap of similar enterprises directed many years ago by Walter Hill.  I'm thinking of Hill's pictures like Trespass (1992) and Southern Comfort.  Saulnier has some sense for genre film making but he amps up the violence too high and, then, doesn't know how to stage fight scenes.  The gore is realistic but weirdly disengaged.