One punk band’s final stop on a disappointing tour leads them to a terror-filled nightmare, in “Green Room”. Down on their luck band The Ain’t Rights are finishing up a long and unsuccessful tour, and are about to call it quits when they get an unexpected booking at an isolated, run-down club deep in the backwoods of Oregon. What seems merely to be a third-rate gig escalates into something much more sinister when they witness an act of violence backstage that they weren’t meant to see. Now trapped backstage, they must face off against the club’s depraved owner, Darcy Banker (Stewart), a man who will do anything to protect the secrets of his nefarious enterprise. But while Darcy and his henchmen think the band will be easy to get rid of, The Ain’t Rights prove themselves much more cunning and capable than anyone expected, turning the tables on their unsuspecting captors and setting the stage for the ultimate life-or-death showdown. “Green Room” is written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, and is rated R for brutal graphic violence, bloody gore, adult language, and minor drug use.

Jeremy Saulnier is quickly moving up on my list of favorite directors. After the acheivement that was “Blue Ruin” in 2014, Jeremy has hit a nearly equally impressive effort with “Green Room”, a tribute to all things 90’s slasher movies. Where the movie really takes off is in an atmospheric danger in tone that really captures the severity of the trouble that this band of kids has put themselves in. The film is based on a punk band, so the movie feels like a rock n roll nightmare of precisely articulate tension, on top of out-of-this-world practical effects in brutality that is among the best that I have seen this decade. At 89 minutes, the movie’s screenplay is wonderfully paced to add a new layer to the growing complexity of these maniacs every second. Saulnier lends his increasing popularity to a script that never substitutes impact for horror cliches of the modern era. Instead, Saulnier paces the audience. As a result, what little jump scares “Green Room” has is understandable because it puts an extra emphasis oh the brutality.

Going back to the brutality for a second, because it’s impossible not to gush about the visual gore that the film displays for itself. Prop director Paul Curtin sends shivers down the audience’s spines with on-screen visuals for blood that hits us right in the gut. What’s impressive about doing something original like this in 2016, is that we have been through so much in the horror genre, so to find a movie where the makeup effects matter is that much more impressive. Working in a 1-2 combo punch with sound editor Roland Vajs, the duo make sure the audience feel every violent blow throughout a film that never lets up. This movie hit me as hard as it could within the first 25 minutes, and never let me up for a moment to breathe, between suffocating tension and violence that made even the biggest of horror fans blush. Every gut-wrenching blow comes out of nowhere, and the sound that follows gives an almost four-dimensional physicality with the audience watching. Saulnier directs the perfect camera angle each time for the most impact, and it never fails to pay off artistically.

The movie did have a couple of things from making this a modern day classic. One of which I will get to later, but the other two have to deal with the script itself. One negative that I have noticed from Jeremy’s work is that he doesn’t quite know how to end a film. Sadly, that tradition continues in “Green Room”. The film ends anti-climatically without any kind of struggle or big payoff, so it often feels like a long night of partying through the first two acts of the movie, with the third act being the hangover. My second problem revolves around some of the cheesy dialogue for our two main protagonists late in the movie. I’m not going to spoil who makes it to the end, but it was the two least exciting characters for me, so we kind of get some lines that feel forced to hold up with their character arcs. I can understand if this is intentional, but it kind of takes a horror movie for adults and gives it that teenage maturity feel during certain unnatural points.

The performances brought a lot of surprises both positively and negatively. On that third problem that I had with the movie; I was a little disappointed that Patrick Stewart didn’t get a lot more screen time to make the most menacing of central antagonists. That’s not to say that Stewart’s performance wasn’t good, just kind of there without much reasoning. The film builds up so many vilains in the way of this punk band, and there’ honestly not a lot of time left to find out what makes this man tick. Considering how many positive reviews I have read for his performance, it kind of left me scratching my head in search of that big moment where the actor makes the character his. Making up for this disappointment however, is the duo of Imogen Poots and Anton Yelchin. Poots in particularly gives the greatest performance of her young career. She begins as a stranger in this club, but the transformation makes for a badass female lead that the ladies of the audience can get behind. Imogen has the pleasure of delivering the best line of the film, and it sends the audience home on a note of light-hearted humor after the bloodbath that just ensued. Yelchin, while not my favorite of actors, does give a noteworthy performance through all of the guy-liner and punk style hairdos. Anton is a character who takes a beating and keeps on ticking, along the way giving us that voice of hope for the overstacked adversity that lays literally and figuatively at their door.

“Green Room” delivers unapologetic thrills with an artistic style very rarely seen in the horror genre. Saulnier captivates us while giving a reminder that the biggest monsters are sometimes human.

7/10