"Green Room" Asks the Question: How Will Today's 20-Somethings Fare in a Horror Movie Crisis?

Green Room is an abysmal new horror-thriller from writer-director Jeremy Saulnier (Blue Ruin) about a punk-metal band trapped inside a dive-bar by a bunch of white supremacists. The movie recalls, loosely, the exploitation shockers from the 70s like Wes Craven’s Last House on the Left, but Green Room never builds to the fever pitch of Last House or other similar films that, as reprehensible as most of them are, at least had the courage to embrace total insanity. Green Room certainly embraces its own gruesome and unpleasant nature, but this movie never loses control, never just goes full-on crazy. If it did, perhaps it would be better. Green Room is too calculated for that, like a sociopath who just wants you to think he’s bonkers. And the movie never develops the kind of loose energy that great exploitation movies need: it’s all fits and starts (the attackers attack, the victims fight back, things settle down, they heat up again, and so on). Furthermore, Saulnier weighs the movie down with too much inane dialogue between his characters. Saulnier rightly wants to give his audience little breaks from the tension, but his dopey characters utter their lines with such bland disinterest that they might as well be filming their Behind-the-Music documentary when they’re not fending off machetes and attack dogs.

Here’s the setup: At a dive-bar somewhere in Southern Oregon, Patrick (Anton Yelchin), a guitarist in a punk-metal band witnesses a murder and tries to call 911 before one of the killers wrests the phone from him and he and his band-mates are locked inside the green room. Inside with Patrick are Reece (Joe Cole), Sam (Alia Shawkat), and Tiger (Callum Turner), along with one of the white supremacist’s girlfriends, Amber (Imogen Poots), and keeping watch is one of the Neo-Nazis, a big bear of a man named Justin, who pretty successfully takes on three of the skinny 20-somethings with ease, until one of them gets him in a death grip and holds him there until the others can snatch his gun.

But it doesn’t matter: these white supremacists are well-organized. They stage a fake stabbing in order to lose the police, and then summon Darcy, their icy, calculating neo-Nazi leader (Patrick Stewart), to figure out what to do with the band-mates. Instead of quickly dispatching with their prisoners, Darcy and his men wage a relentless, strategic, escalating attack against four skinny middle-class 20-something who may be the least resourceful smart kids I’ve ever seen in a horror movie. Perhaps this is a cautionary tale about how millenials will fare in a crisis: They argue about who has to hold the gun, they make too much noise when they try to escape, and Patrick has to trick himself that it’s all a game in order to fight back. (This is after he nearly loses his hand in a particularly grueling scene.)

But, in their defense, the band-mates do have a few tricks up their sleeves: They use microphones and speakers to create feedback in the monitors, which makes the attack dogs whimper and retreat. Sam makes effective use of a fire extinguisher; other band members use any makeshift weapon they can find, from a mic stand to one of those long, glow-stick-like fluorescent light bulbs.

Patrick emerges as the film’s unlikely hero, although he’s aided by the surprisingly funny and strong-willed Neo-Nazi girl Amber. At the beginning of the movie, we hear Patrick waxing on about the beauty of live performance as the only true way to experience music. But in the green room, none of his eloquent theories about art matter. He’s reduced to his own instincts and physical strength, and initially he cowers. But Patrick is the one who finally psyches himself up enough to fight back, by imagining it’s all just a game, that he doesn’t have to worry about death. He can never fully embrace the reality of the situation. “This is a nightmare,” he says. “Shouldn’t we be panicking?” Except for his reaction to the aforementioned injury, Patrick’s emotions do not fluctuate; he’s never truly affected by anything, not even the deaths of people he cares about.

Those little quips like “shouldn’t we be panicking?” are uttered in mockery of the situation, and they amount to decidedly lackluster attempts at levity. Green Room may be too self-serious to start making light of things in the first place. Saulnier wants to horrify us with his images, like when he cuts to a close-up of a character’s mangled neck: he’s just been ferociously mauled by a hell-hound, Baskerville style. Saulnier establishes a lame running joke too: Early in the film, when the band-mates are being interviewed for some underground radio show, the host asks each of them what band they’d want to listen to if stranded on a desert island. As perhaps another cynical jab at 20-somethings, Saulnier lets the band-mates agonize over their choices, as though the scenario might one day present itself for real, and they’d be really sorry if they accidentally picked the Ramones over the Sex Pistols (but secretly really wanted Madonna).

Near the end of the movie, Patrick, who has been unable to think of an answer, says, “I figured out my desert island band.” Amber, the white supremacist chick who’s been thrust into their world as a fellow prisoner, retorts, “find somebody who gives a shit.” The joke works beautifully, thanks to Amber’s droll delivery. (Poots is really the stand-out in this movie.) Anton Yelchin, who brandishes his husky voice like a velvety cutlass, is a strong performer, and he’s able to carry Green Room in spite of its many short-comings. (And of course, Patrick Stewart is perfectly cast as the Neo-Nazi Father, running the show, keeping dangerously calm throughout.)

But no one saves Green Room from being irritating and unpleasant. Gore hounds may enjoy this movie, although it’s not really that gory. It has a few hard-to-watch scenes. More than anything, Green Room is about survival, about being stripped of the BS that we normally carry around as armor, when we realize none of it will keep us safe in the face of a truly surreal crisis. But this idea wasn’t enough to make me care about the movie. I felt a lot like Amber did. 

28 Weeks Later

Warning: Spoilers abound in the opening paragraph of this review.

I don’t know why I watch zombie movies. They always kill off characters I love. Or in the case of 28 Weeks Later (the 2007 sequel to Danny Boyle’s fiercely scary 28 Days Later), it’s not just the characters but the actors who play them. You basically know that the people played by Rose Byrne and Jeremy Renner—an army doctor and sniper, respectively—are toast, well before they actually get run through the cinematic toaster oven. Whenever an actor I love dies on screen, part of me turns cold on the movie. “Well, who cares what happens now?” I think/exclaim/moan.

As sequels go, 28 Weeks Later is pretty strong. There are the expected irksome plot inconsistencies, but it’s a compelling hour-and-a-half, rife with infected-zombie-carnage and steeped in the apocalyptic mania that possessed the popular culture (not for the first time) during the previous decade. The film opens in the English countryside, where a handful of people are barricaded inside a farmhouse, hiding from the infected humans, who have turned into raging viral cannonballs. One drop of their blood in your mouth, one scratch of their fingernails on your skin, and you become one of them, changing over in mere seconds. And they run—how they run—like the dickens. The thing about uber-strong, hyper-active, running zombies is, there’s virtually nothing you can do. They take what already amounts to nihilistic bleakness and turn it up a notch.

Shortly after the film’s intense prologue, the U.S. military has contained the virus and is now in the process of restoring London. Survivors are being returned to their fair city to a specially contained district, where they’re under constant military supervision. Naturally, the zombie virus reinserts itself into the scenario and all hell breaks loose, forcing another band of survivors, including the sniper and the doctor, to run for cover. But this time, two of the group—a brother and sister—may possess the key to permanent extinction of the virus, in their potentially immune bloodstream.

What follows is a generally satisfying blend of the predictable and the terrifying. The U.S. military presence (the dubious saviors of the first film) goes from heroic to monstrous in moments, and it’s easy to read a lot of geo-political commentary here. 2007 was, of course, in the midst of the war in Iraq. Jeremy Renner was two years away from his career-making performance in Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. He was made for these kinds of parts. Renner has a natural toughness that suits him when he plays a cop or a sniper or what-have-you, but he also possesses a deeply humanizing levity and tenderness, which he can apply to any scene with apparent ease. He’s a marvelous actor (the most likable performer in 2013’s American Hustle). And Rose Byrne is always fascinating to watch on screen. She’s made a name for herself as a comic actress of late (giving gem-performances in Spy, Neighbors, and Bridesmaids), and it’s more proof that actresses can be the best comedians when you see how versatile she is, capable of carrying out the lunacy of Spy or the ferocity of this little number, a perhaps forgettable but ultimately very disturbing movie that deepens the terror of its predecessor.

I do have to mention the shaky camera effect. Danny Boyle’s original also employed this irritating technique, and it had me rather perturbed here too. What exactly are we supposed to get out of not being able to interpret the action of a sequence? Is the shaky camera simply a way around doing good camera-work? My suspicion is that it’s also a cheap way to create a sense of chaos, putting the screws on the audience as much as possible. But to that I say, go back and watch some of the masters and see if they employ the damn shaky camera technique.

Nevertheless, the director, Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, does mostly good work here. 28 Weeks Later is no embarrassment. It’s entertaining for those of us who like a good zombie flick, and it’s likely to freak you out if you’re at all concerned about this kind of thing happening for real. If it does, I think I’d follow Jeremy Renner and Rose Byrne. They react well in a crisis situation. 

Fright Night

The original Fright Night (1985) was a celebration and a send-up of camp. The movie opens to a dimly lit suburban neighborhood around midnight, and the audio of a late-nite horror movie program leads us into the bedroom of our hero, Charlie Brewster, who's too busy making out with his girlfriend to notice what's going on at his new neighbor's house, at first. Fright Night 1985 is something special to me, so I felt ambivalent toward the idea of a remake.

The 2011 remake gives Fright Night a contemporary make-over. It would seem like a refreshing antidote to the banality of Twilight, which is pure drivel as romance or as gothic horror.

We'll start with the good things: Anton Yelchin makes for a convincing Charlie Brewster, the put-upon boy-who-cried-wolf of the movie, who's unwilling to accept his nerdy friend Ed's claim that Charlie's new neighbor, the dashing Jerry Dandrige, is a bloodsucking vampire. As Dandrige, Colin Farrell is wonderfully ominous. He's so enjoyable as the vampire that you have a hard time sympathizing with the would-be victims. Dandrige likes screwing with his prey, playing darkly funny little mind games with them. Unfortunately, the scenes of Dandrige attacking his victims fall flat. There's something unconvincing about the way he tears open their necks (and their deaths seem meaningless the way they do in slasher movies). Only the satisfaction in Jerry's face works for those scenes--his insatiable appetite for blood is momentarily soothed, and he reminds you that the vampire is the ultimate junky.

The Peter Vincent character, played as a doddering old coward by Roddy McDowall in the 1985 version, has been altered for humorous affect to be a Las Vegas hack occultist with a nightly horror show. David Tennant plays him, and he invests some momentary comic relief, but his part never gets knitted into the story with any real panache. He and Charlie don't really mesh as a duo--they aren't given enough time.

Which brings me to the not-so-good stuff. The movie plays all its cards too soon. Characters aren't developed, relationships either, with the right pacing or momentum. We're meant to assume a lot about these relationships that, without experiencing them in the right ways and amounts of time, end up hurting the movie. It's harder to care about the characters let alone be scared for them. The humor in the movie is good because it keeps things light and helps avoid heavy-handedness, but at the same time no one seems very invested in what's happening. And there isn't that affection for the genre that makes a good horror-comedy click and resonate the way it should.

The rest of the cast includes Toni Collete as Charlie's mom (well-played for more comic effect), Imogen Poots as his girlfriend Amy, and Christopher Mintz-Plasse as Ed. He doesn't even come close to the off-the-wall performance of Stephen Geoffreys in the first film. He's too subdued, too nerdy to be frightening when he inevitably turns into an enemy. And that's the real problem with the remake: it's not all that scary. But it's good for a laugh, and probably worth seeing for Colin Farrell's performance alone.

The scene at the end with all the vampires is another problem. It reminded me of the part in Salem's Lot when they stumble upon Barlow's coffin under the house but are accosted by all his vampire henchmen. It's also mildly reminiscent of that wonderfully giddy moment in Re-Animator when all the corpses shoot up out of their gurneys in unison. Unfortunately, director Craig Gillespie doesn't seem to know how to make that scene pop the way it should. It feels deflated. The only other thing I'll say about the ending is that its kind to the viewer in not subjecting us to twelve phony climaxes the way so many action and horror movies feel obliged to do---the finale is nicely compact.

Jane Eyre

A compact adaptation of Charlotte Bronte's semi-gothic romance, directed by Cary Fukunaga and written by Moira Buffini. It's hard to fathom the skill involved in telling Jane Eyre under two hours without missing the subtle, deliberately paced story elements which have made the book such an enduring tale. What the movie lacks as far as development it makes up for in visual energy and pace. It captures the grimness of the plight of women--particularly lower-class women--and yet there's an ethereal lightness that Adriano Goldman captures in his camera work. He brings a breathtaking sense of vitality to the new Jane Eyre.

The casting is spot on. As Jane, Mia Wasikowska knows how to convey the turbulent spirit of her character. Her passion refuses to be quelled by social conventions. And yet she refuses to disrespect herself or her sense of right and wrong. As Rochester, Michael Fassbender has the right mixture of rugged incisiveness and vulnerability. I think Charlotte Bronte would agree that Rochester is a dick, but Jane somehow sees past the irritating aspects of his personality to the good inside him, the tortured soul.

During the fateful wedding scene (I'll avoid spoilers for those of you who haven't read the novel or seen any of the other film adaptations), I laughed because it seems one of the fixations of Victorian literature has been the tortured hero, the man with a deep, dark secret. It's always such a shock to everyone else, or at least to the heroine, who's so innocent, so unspoiled, that she could never imagine some other kind of life for her darling husband-to-be. Men have the remarkable quality of being both earnestly guilty for our actions and ravenously hungry for more. Robert Louis Stevenson's Jekyll/Hyde character is perhaps one of the best embodiments of this in all of pop literature. Bronte's Rochester is another. He's pure appetite.

Jane makes it plain in the movie that she might be just like him if she could. The constraints put on women at the time forbid this, of course, and the movie is a testament to how wretched was the condition of most women. They were taught propaganda by cruel, hard Calvinists without a speck of compassion in their veins. Jane refuses to believe the propaganda, and Mia Wasikowska somehow manages to convey all the complex emotions of the character with very little dialogue to put her feelings into words. She's a woman who thinks and feels so much more than she can say, and the movie itself is the same way. There's so much tacit emotion within the frames, so much that cannot be contained by the frames. You feel that the makers could have done something even more spectacular with an original work. Adapting Victorian novels seems almost like an obstacle, except that it allows us to experience a kind of oppression (and repression) we might not otherwise understand.

I don't want to spend too much time comparing Jane Eyre the movie to Jane Eyre the book. I think that's an unfair way to look at the latest incarnation of the Bronte story, because I think we should evaluate the movie for what it is, rather than what it isn't. We can't fault the filmmakers for not making a direct translation. What would be the point of making the movie, then? What we can be glad for is a literate, passionate yet controlled movie that isn't bogged down in exposition, and somehow manages to capture a magnetic sense of lyricism. There's not really any romanticism about the past. There's the picture of two souls who feel lost without each other. They're spiritually connected. Near the end, St. John (pronounced Sin Jin) lightly mocks Jane for speaking to Rochester even though he's nowhere nearby. St. John asks incredulously, "why are you talking to the air?" Jane feels a connection to him, an urgent calling. St. John, a devout minister and missionary, whole-heartedly believes in spiritual connections, but not that kind. He's unable or unwilling to consider the possibility. Jane, on the other hand, is willing. She doesn't shut life out, as much as life has tried to shut her out.

Judi Dench plays the head housekeeper Mrs. Fairfax; Jamie Bell plays the devout preacher St. John; Imogen Poots is Rochester's vapid flirt, Blanche Ingram; Sally Hawkins plays Jane's unfeeling Aunt Reed; and Romy Settbon plays Adele, Rochester's ward.

Playing exclusively at 5 Pointes Theatre thru June 23!