“Green Room” is one of the most anti-holiday movies and frightening films of 2015.
A term for a windowless room that is used by performers to prepare for their live/taped performance, the “green room” is your one last chance to put on your makeup, add some hair gel and tie your shoelaces.
Except in this case, the Green Room immediately brings to “life” one of the worst ways to die, the claustrophobic walls that close in all around you and there is no way out. You are stuck. Much like being buried alive with a bunch of people you thought were your friends, who really are seconds away from freaking out and sticking a knife in your back.
And all of this claustrophic influence pushes these four young punk musicians into involuntary hostage-takers.
Starring Patrick Stewart (“Star Trek”) as Darcy Banker, the British thespian who is usually known for his light hearted dramas and his previous work as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in TV’s “Star Trek: The Next Generation” (found now only on TV reruns) as well as his Shakespearian stage appearances, said that when given the script for Green Room and sitting back in his spacious manor in the English moors, was instantly terrified by what he read.
He jumped at the role.
In “Green Room,” we are introduced to The Ain’t Rights punk band from Virginia, truly struggling to make the big time and going from gig to gig in America’s rural northwest. Basically they are playing for food money and with one mistake after another, the band finds itself performing at a matinee show within a compound in the backwoods of Oregon.
Big mistake.
When you are in a place you don’t know, it’s best to keep your mouth shut and especially so when you are performing to an audience of neo-Nazi skinheads.
Bad mistake.
Their one bad thing turns into a really bad thing as the band stumbles something truly horrific; then going one-on-one with the club’s owner and gruppenführer Darcy (Stewart) and some very nasty white supremacists, it’s clear that the band is in big trouble.
Terror is not something you normally think of during the end of the year holidays with cheerful, uplifting movies
dotting the movie guide of this newspaper.
Certainly you come across one “slasher” film or another but “Green Room” is something quite different. It turned heads at the recent Toronto Film Festival and has an excellent cast with fellow “Star Trek” alumnus Anton Yelchin and Imogen Poots (“28 Weeks Later”) as Amber, the sheltered sole female lead.
Directed and written for the screen by Jermey Saulnier who had a short film run behind the camera with the screen cult hit Blue Ruin, but is more known in the film world for his work as a second unit or additional camera operator. His work as an electrical engineer, casting director and cinematographer is certainly recognizable.
But when Hollywood embraces your script, you run with it and in this case, with Stewart as his lead actor, Saulnier was wise to wrap the former Starship Captain around a terrific cast.
Stewart is really great as a terribly bad guy and you can tell that he hasn’t had many of them. His moral compass is a few bars south of the equator and as Darcy, would can easily see him being perfectly content living in Berlin in 1939 at the height of the Nazi regime.
I loved him in this role and the entire casting effort was superb.
With violence churning away across the globe and neo-Nazi’s returning back to popularity (such as it is), you too will be scared witless having to be stuck within a “Green Room.”
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