Title: Green Room
Rating: R
Director: Jeremy Saulnier
Starring: Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, Patrick Stewart
Runtime: 1 Hour 35 Minutes

What It Is: Down-on-their-luck punk rockers The Ain’t Rights agree to a last-minute gig in a backwoods Oregon roadhouse, where they witness a murder and then find themselves under attack by a ruthless club owner and his associates, leading to shocking consequences.

What We Think: This film is white-supremacy-exploitation-lite done up as a horror movie. Attack dogs come free of charge. Oh, what bloody work they can do on someone’s throat. Using an obsolete hardcore punk trope, whereby an [obviously] white hardcore band “Ain’t Rights,” (with a badass Jewish girl member played by (Alia Shawkat) in their mid-20s, play an ill-fated gig at an isolated neo-Nazi bar staffed with skinheads. The band plays a set that inevitably includes a horrible version of The Dead Kennedy’s “Nazi Punks Fuck Off” (it would have been much hotter if the band was made up of a Muslim, a Black, a Jew, and a transgendered character). That would have made for ultimate exploitation detonation. The band’s bass player Pat gets his hand cut — badly cut, but in antiquated horror-movie fashion, he carries on with no difficulties..In my opinion,  in modern day cinema, if you’re going to mutilate a character, let’s see how a person would behave realistically, under those conditions. The movie is harrowing, but it lacks wit. Fans of extreme violence and gore will be sated. The picture fails to editorialise (cinematically or allegorically) on white racism and thematically it had nothing to say.

Our Grade: D-, The Green Room seems to be gathering a bit of a cult following but I simply don’t see it. The film was incoherent in the way it was shot and edited and this was none more prevalent in outdoor chase scenes. The set up promised much and Patrick Stewart is cast superbly but it never came together at all and I can’t really understand the five star reviews I have seen for it. After twenty minutes it was actually quite boring. I have to admit.  Blue Ruin is the directors other film and that cult following is definitely understandable but this is something I will forget easily.