One of the Most Chilling Genre Films of the Last Decade Now Streaming Free: “Brutal Survival Horror”
If you hang around the horror space long enough, you start to see behind the curtain more and more. It doesn’t mean you lose your appreciation for the craft of a good kill or a good monster, but it becomes easier to see the zipper up the back of the suit, or the hoses pumping in the fake blood. For times like that, when you start to feel numb to the genre’s visceral thrills, there are movies like Green Room.
Released in 2016, Jeremy Saulnier’s film about a punk band trapped in a skinhead bar remains one of the most harrowing horror experiences of the past decade, and considering the competition, that is really saying something. Like all of Saulnier’s work, including films like Blue Ruin and last year’s Rebel Ridge, it’s a movie that deals with violence in an intimate, deeply chilling way, with a horror edge those other films don’t quite have. It’s an essential piece of 21st-century horror, and thanks to Pluto TV, you can watch it for free right now.
Green Room is the story of punk band the Ain’t Rights (Anton Yelchin, Alia Shawkat, Joe Cole, and Callum Turner), an underground group on tour in a van who are desperate for a gig to cover a recent cancellation. They eventually find it, only to discover that they’ve been booked at a neo-Nazi bar. It’s tense, especially when the band launches into “Nazi Punks F–k Off” by the Dead Kennedys, and just when the band’s about to leave, they accidentally witness a murder in the bar’s green room. To cover their tracks, the skinheads lock the band inside said green room while their ruthless leader (Patrick Stewart) decides what to do next.
From that point forward, Green Room shifts from a movie all about tension and the threat of something to a movie about survival at all costs, an all-out siege between killers and punks. Patrick Stewart absolutely crushes it as Darcy, the vicious leader of the skinheads, but he’s far from the only one. Yelchin and Shawkat are phenomenal in this movie, as is Imogen Poots, who plays a young woman caught in the middle of it all.
The real star, though? It’s the ever-present threat of violence, and how far you might be willing to go to make it out alive. The violence in Green Room is never over the top, nor is it dispensed casually. But when it hits, it hits you right in the gut, leaving you squirming in your seat as everything from dogs to guns to box cutters come out.
Writing on the film back in 2016, Dread Central’s Padraig Cotter called it “a brutal survival horror thriller that will unnerve even hardened genre fans,” and speaking as a hardened genre fan, I agree. This film will knock you on your ass.
Categorized: Streaming News