Movie Review—Green Room

 by Peter J. O’Connell

Green Room. Released: April 2016. Runtime: 95 mins. MPAA rating: R for strong, brutal, graphic violence; gory images; language and some drug content.

As those Westerns featuring white folks on the frontier battling “redskins” faded from movie screens in the 1960s and 1970s, one of the genres that emerged to replace them featured city folks in the wilderness or rural areas battling “rednecks” (who were sometimes criminals and sometimes cops). Such films ranged from schlocky and exploitative ones to critically acclaimed woks, such as Deliverance (1972).

Green Room, written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, is no Deliverance, but it does have considerably more merit than one might guess from its MPAA rating. Its premise is clever; its acting good; and its plotting and directing imaginative.

“The Ain’t Rights,” a punk rock group—composed of Pat (Anton Yelchin), Reece (Joe Cole), Sam (Alia Shawkat) and Tiger (Callum Turner)—are living in their van and barely getting by amid the gloomy forests and small towns of the Pacific Northwest. Desperate, they take a gig at a dive bar in the wilderness. This dive bar is definitely at the lowest depths, for its manager, Darcy, played by famously bald British thesp Patrick Stewart, noted for everything from Shakespeare on stage to StarTrek: Generations on TV, is running a drug operation out of the bar and also hosts gatherings of neo-Nazi “skinheads.”

When a murder takes place in the “green room”—the area in a venue where performers or speakers wait before going on stage—Darcy orders that the band members, as witnesses, be exterminated. The four hapless musicians, joined by Amber (Imogen Poots), a young woman who is not a skinhead, barricade themselves in the green room and attempt first to keep the skinheads out and then to break out themselves.

The embattled group draws on every ounce of strength that they possess and use every possible weapon that they can lay hands on—from fluorescent lights to fire extinguishers to box cutters. The struggle becomes even more fierce when Darcy has pit bulls brought in.

Appropriately enough, the closing credits of the movie feature Creedence Clearwater Revival’s “Bad Moon on the Right.”