Alex Serrano

Communications & New Media Major

For five twenty-something year-olds, life just got a lot worse. The band, touring as the Ain’t Rights, has been down on its luck. Siphoning gas, crashing with a college-radio punk, and sleeping in their crummy van is their reality. So when their latest gig is gypped out from under them, they graciously take an actual paying gig at a neo-Nazi skinhead club. Opening with a standoffish and rousing rendition of The Dead Kennedys’ Nazi Punks F*ckk Off, the band finds unity with the audience in punk music’s inherent guitar-thrashing, head-banging pathos. So when Pat (Anton Yelchin) finds a murder in progress in the green room and Patrick Stewart’s Darcy unleashes his “red-laced” soldiers, you know not everyone is making it out of the Green Room alive.

This is not a film for the faint of heart. Along with a grotesque penchant for gore, director Jeremy Saulnier has already proven himself to be a master of suspense. His previous masterpiece, Blue Ruin, gunshot, and guttural scream demands to be felt to its full intensity.

While this movie has largely been sold as a Patrick Stewart vehicle, the focal point of the film is the band. Led by Anton Yelchin’s Pat and Alia Shawkat’s Sam, every one of them is a real and truly filled out character. A lesser horror movie based on the same premise probably would’ve given us cannon fodder characters to dispense of as soon as the action got going. But when our heroes are slowly picked off by misled neo-Nazis teens and vice versa, you can’t help feeling something for these bright-eyed and bushy-tailed punks as their faces are chewed off by attack dogs or shot by skinhead shotguns.

While this film doesn’t have thedeepest themes or message, it is one hell of a blast. With a faster clip than most horror movies (which languish in the setup and prolong the payoff), Green Room is a crazy punk thriller eager to rattle your bones. So if you’re faint of heart and the thought of seeing a man’s stomach sliced open makes you sorta sick, well, that’s just the first fifteen minutes.