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Green Room: Jeremy Saulnier’s new flick not for the faint of heart

Julian WrightEastern Reporter

A CROSS between the claustrophobic thrills of Panic Room and the gleeful gore spattering in You’re Next, Green Room is not for the faint-hearted or the easily rattled.

But for anyone who can handle some graphic bodily mutilation, this is right up your blood-drenched alley.

A punk rock band on a low-budget tour (siphoning petrol from other cars to get their van going) take a gig at a remote location in Virginia, where the patrons are skin-head Nazis.

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Despite a few airborne bottles of booze and scary looking gig-goers, the set is a success.

After their set, they are about to leave but the retrieval of a charging mobile phone in the green room leads them to unwittingly witness a murder.

Locked in a room with no way out, it becomes a power play between the band mates turned survivalists and their captors, led by venue owner Darcy (Patrick Stewart in an against-type role), who are keen to eliminate all witnesses and evidence of their presence.

Short on plot, but big on tension and surprises, Green Room is the rare kind of film that can depict unpleasantness while still managing to slip in a few humorous moments, without sacrificing scares.

Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier’s style sits somewhere between horror greats John Carpenter, who favoured suspense over gore, and Wes Craven, who was not afraid of using buckets of blood to unnerve his audience.

Here, he builds palpable dread by putting a likeable ragtag team into this grim setting and then ramps up the shocks.

But there is a level of reality to this film; the scary thing about these skin heads is that they are as organised as the MobThey are not just hot-headed junkies or low-rent criminals, but their victims are a resourceful group.

The kind of film that would suit midnight screenings or a double bill with The Texas Chain Saw Massacre for horror-hounds, Green Room is pulpy fun.