Green Room (2016)
Directed by Jeremy Saulnier
Members of a punk rock band and a tough young woman are forced to fight for survival after witnessing an act of violence at a skinhead bar.
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39 films that influenced Green Room
What critics say influenced Green Room
The resourceful Ain’t Rights fend off the onslaughts of a terrifying, determined enemy, echoing other classic versions of defend-the-castle films such as Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” and John Carpenter’s “Assault on Precinct 13.” It’s almost like one of those “escape room” venues where you actually die if you can’t figure out the puzzle in time.
When John Carpenter made Assault on Precinct 13 in 1976, he readily acknowledged the influence he drew from George A. Romero in crafting the homogeneous zombie-like horde of gang members laying siege to an L.A. police station.
It’s a simple, pulpy set-up—reminiscent of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), which were themselves derived from various westerns involving characters trapped inside forts and farmhouses—and Saulnier, who both wrote and directed, revels in the primal nastiness of what the will to live looks like in the most dire of circumstances while also infusing the film with a level of visual artistry and black humor that suggests he is capable of much more.
What ensues is very much reminiscent of Carpenter’s “Assault on Precinct 13.”
This movie also borrows from Peckinpah’s school of dark revenge, but this time recalls the likes of the more sordid “Straw Dogs.”
He has designed this film to pay homage both to splatter films and to the better, more complicated movies that he first experienced in youth, such as John Boorman’s emotionally harrowing Deliverance and Sam Peckinpah’s complex, seminal Straw Dogs.
The resourceful Ain’t Rights fend off the onslaughts of a terrifying, determined enemy, echoing other classic versions of defend-the-castle films such as Sam Peckinpah’s “Straw Dogs” and John Carpenter’s “Assault on Precinct 13.”
Saulnier cites Sam Peckinpah's classic Straw Dogs as an influence, and both movies share a knack for taking a very limited space and mining it to full, brutal capacity.
He has designed this film to pay homage both to splatter films and to the better, more complicated movies that he first experienced in youth, such as John Boorman’s emotionally harrowing Deliverance and Sam Peckinpah’s complex, seminal Straw Dogs.
And when the actors respond to that violence, they do so not with gritted-teeth steeliness, but the full pain and panic one might expect from any ordinary person caught in this situation; a scene involving some exposed meat and a sharpened machete brings to mind Deliverance , specifically the way John Boorman let a femoral fracture shatter every macho bone in a young Burt Reynolds’ body.
Before you can say River’s Edge meets Assault on Precinct 13 (via Deliverance ), dressing room doors are locked, 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" is such a gonzo knockout of siege cinema — "Deliverance" meets "Assault on Precinct 13" — that you hope it finds an appreciative audience beyond horror lovers already itching to embrace it.
…have crafted a gleefully merciless update on Deliverance, except instead of city folk vs. hillbillies, it’s punk rockers vs. neo-Nazis, and it is one of the most brutal, visceral films to come along in quite some time.
Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s “Green Room” is a wonderfully nasty, gruesome, jagged-edge gem of a horror film, with echoes of “The Cabin in the Woods,” “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “The Evil Dead,” and so many other films about a group of smart and cynical young people who find themselves cut off from the civilized world and in a bloody mess from which there just might be no escape.
Previous horror movies — 1974's "The Texas Chain Saw Massacre," most famously — have demonstrated that young people who travel in vans to remote locations may not live to regret it.
Like the films of Dario Argenta or The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Green Room will persist in the imaginations of coming generations.
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Writer-director Jeremy Saulnier’s “Green Room” is a wonderfully nasty, gruesome, jagged-edge gem of a horror film, with echoes of “The Cabin in the Woods,” “The Texas Chain Saw Massacre” and “The Evil Dead,” and so many other films about a group of smart and cynical young people who find themselves cut off from the civilized world and in a bloody mess from which there just might be no escape.
The movie’s second half is deadly simple and consistently compelling, rivaling Sam Raimi’s classic “The Evil Dead” in both violence and suspense.
“Green Room” is just as masterfully controlled and just as loaded with black humor and plot twists, but it belongs to a more recognizable genre: This is a cabin-in-the-woods film, not dissimilar to “The Evil Dead” or “From Dusk Till Dawn,” except that our band of roguish heroes are besieged by wannabe commandos from the Fourth Reich rather than literal zombies or demons.
That inspired bit of casting is almost enough to inscribe “Green Room” alongside “Sexy Beast” in the pantheon of against-type British thespian screen villainy.
Like his chrome-domed countryman Ben Kingsley in 2001’s Sexy Beast, Stewart is way scarier when he’s neither barking nor biting but just purring controlled threats.
Stewart's performance isn't the landmark it's being sold as; certainly not at Ben Kingsley's Sexy Beast degree of difficulty.
It’s a simple, pulpy set-up—reminiscent of George A. Romero’s Night of the Living Dead (1968) and John Carpenter’s Assault on Precinct 13 (1976), which were themselves derived from various westerns involving characters trapped inside forts and farmhouses—and Saulnier, who both wrote and directed, revels in the primal nastiness of what the will to live looks like in the most dire of circumstances while also infusing the film with a level of visual artistry and black humor that suggests he is capable of much more.
If your own misspent youth involved watching Assault on Precinct 13 or Night of the Living Dead on a loop, then you'll feel 16 again throughout.
Saulnier wears influence lightly, not limited to “Night of the Living Dead,” “Assault on Precinct 13,” “Die Hard” and “Straw Dogs.”
At this point, the movie becomes a siege film in the vein of "Straw Dogs," "Night of the Living Dead" and "The Purge," to name just three popular examples, with the Ain't Rights and another witness (Imogen Poots) trapped inside the room with a corpse, a hostile skinhead hostage and few notions on how to escape, much less survive.
Was "Green Room" inspired by an episode in 1980's "Motel Hell," in which a van of punk rockers is run off the road so the members of Ivan and the Terribles can join the "all kinds of critters" found in "Farmer Vincent's fritters"?
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But to see the difference between using a setting for “color” and uniting it with content, you only need to look at Walter Hill’s Trespass (1992).
From here, Green Room escalates into a cacophony of tension and spilled viscera as the group try to escape from the skins, their struggle recalling the tagline on the original poster for The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: “Who will survive and what will be left of them?”
The Ain’t Rights are a hardcore quartet who’ve been touring the country in a beat-up van straight out of Scooby-Doo (or, perhaps more fitting for this blood-soaked film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre).
The film follows The Ain’t Rights, a punk band that’s touring the country in a beat up van — similar to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.