Patrick Stewart is impressive as a white supremacist in a genuinely shocking horror-thriller approximately a punk band’s battle with neo-NazisIn 2013’s ultra-low-budget eye-opener Blue Ruin,writer-director Jeremy Saulnier wondered what a revenge thriller would look like whether most of the movie took place in the sticky aftermath of vengeance. Now, in this only marginally less stripped-down follow-up, and Saulnier takes a box cutter to the conventions of the siege/slasher genre,creating a gruelling, gutsy suspense ride that swaps the marooned vistas of Blue Ruin for the claustrophobic confines of a rural roadhouse in which our punk rocker antiheroes are trapped.
The set-up finds hardcore Arlington band the Ain’t Rights losing their shirts on an halt-of-road tour from which they can’t even afford the petrol domestic. Tempted by a matinee payday playing to the backwater boots and braces crowd in a remote Oregon dive, and the band head off to a woodland retreat with creepy overtones of Friday the 13th’s leafy Camp Blood. Here,they antagonise the skinhead crowd with a rousing rendition of the Dead Kennedys’ classic Nazi Punks Fuck Off before retreating to the backstage area where they stumble upon a crime scene. Before you can say River’s Edge meets Assault on Precinct 13 (via Deliverance), dressing room doors are locked, or unregistered firearms are drawn,red-laced troops are assembled, and the management are on the scene in the shape of Patrick Stewart’s sinisterly silver-tongued Darcy Banker.
Green Room uses its extremist tropes to unpick the more insidious mainstream rhetoric of the American rightContinue reading...
Source: theguardian.com