There are several things stopping GREEN ROOM from being just another bleeding piece of slice-and-dice fare that crops up most nights on The Horror Channel, where a hapless bunch of American kids of varying degrees of dumbness fall foul of a gang of TEXAS CHAINSAW MASSACRE clones. For a start it’s written and directed by Jeremy Saulnier, who demonstrated in the low-budget BLUE RUIN his skill (Roger Corman would surely have approved) at creating tension and respecting the audience’s intelligence in what might easily have been a forgettable revenge thriller.

Like Dwight (Macon Blair) the lone hero of BLUE RUIN, punk band The Ain’t Rights are nothing if not resourceful as they make their way across Oregon in their dilapidated tour bus, siphoning off petrol in motel car parks to keep moving from gig to increasingly desperate gig. After a cancellation they’re forced (the audience already willing them not to) to take up an engagement at a club deep in the woods, and it’s soon apparent that this is the worst mismatch since Spinal Tap played the American Air Force base.

The crowd is made up of skinheads and neo-Nazis and after finishing their set amid bottle-throwing and abuse (albeit actually getting paid) The Ain’t Rights are packing up their equipment and getting ready to leave when a brutal murder happens before their eyes. Panicked, the none-too-bright staff – led by Macon Blair’s Gabe – lock the band in the club’s claustrophobic green room and send for Darcy (Patrick Stewart) the club’s owner and chief Nazi, with the glasses to prove it.

His cold-eyed solution is simple and drastic, and the rest of GREEN ROOM is about the bloody fight for survival of The Ain’t Rights and feral local girl Amber (Imogen Poots) as they struggle to ward off homicidal fascists – denoted by the red laces on their boots – armed to the teeth and backed up by attack dogs.

With this and BLUE RUIN he’s shown complete mastery of his chosen genres …

There are familiar elements here of John Boorman’s DELIVERANCE and John Carpenter’s original version of ASSAULT ON PRECINCT 13 – but also echoes of Howard Hawks’s RIO BRAVO which played out its siege with leisurely good humour. The comedy in GREEN ROOM has to be teased out among the literally visceral scenes of gore, but it’s there, as are the glimpses of a back-story explaining the motive behind the murder and fleshing out the attackers, giving them some character instead of abandoning them to be mere DEATH WISH-type ciphers.

While lethal with a Stanley knife, Imogen Poots also invests Amber with wit and even charm as bodies drop like flies around her; the effect is to give the film (and the shocked audience) a breathing space before the next bout of extreme violence. That a strategy remembered from a paintballing contest can be used successfully in retaliation is a sign of Jeremy Saulnier’s confidence in his material, as is the running gag of The Ain’t Rights confessing to their true ‘desert island bands’ as they stare a grisly death in the face. Rarely can ‘Simon and Garfunkel’ have been spoken in such an extreme situation.

Saulnier has said he made GREEN ROOM ‘mainly for former bandmates in teenage punk groups’. With this and BLUE RUIN he’s shown complete mastery of his chosen genres: now it’s time to move on.

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