Author: MKB

Caution: Spoilers

What better way to hop back into reviews than with some suspenseful gory horror? Last week while I was painting, I was chatting with a horror movie king, and he recommended Green Room. Quote on quote, “YOU NEED TO WATCH THAT ONE.” I had to watch it when I could pay attention, so I kept it in the back of my head for a week and here we are. I chose to not watch the trailer or even read the summary before I hit “Start Now”. It was quite the choice, but I’m glad I went into it blind. It made it more insane.

Green Room follows an up and coming band trying to book some gigs to get their name out there. Though, I can’t recall if the name of the band was even given. It’s almost like the creators didn’t want us to be too invested in their story, as opposed to the movie’s story line. (Unless I completely forgot or didn’t hear the name, of course.) There’s 4 members: Pat, Sam, Reece, and Tiger. It’s interesting because the first couple of scenes are a bit disorienting and appear to be cut short. I was kind of confused at first, but truly it ended up feeling like they just cut out less important scenes to make sure they included all the good stuff later on.

The first show they do sucks because all of the bands pulled out and they’re the only ones performing. A no-name band that no one really knows, not many people are going to show up. The group is pissed because they were banking on getting paid from the event, and they only ended up getting $6 each. The guy that hooked them up with the gig tries to make it up to them by recommending his cousin Daniel’s venue that has a pretty decent line up the next day. They’re strapped for cash, so they take him up on the offer.

Now, the guy that recommended his cousin’s place warns them that this particular venue attracts and is owned by… well… white supremacists, and to try not to piss these people off. They note it, although not taking him too seriously, and head out.

They drive out to the venue, meet Daniel and another guy, Gabe, who gets them all set up and ready for their set. They go into the dressing room and there’s a whole bunch of things you’d imagine a venue that loves white supremacists would have. Tiger, the lead singer, decides their first song is going to be a nice ‘fuck you’ to the bigots, but remember, they need their money. They’re not trying to get kicked out by being too combative. They end up playing through their set and during it, there’s a really dope, slow-mo montage of everyone moshing. It’s pretty sick. Right before this montage, there’s a brief moment where Pat notices a girl with dark hair taking money from people in the crowd. She’s super pretty, but almost seems out of place and a tad suspicious. As she moves out of frame, we get a glimpse of Gabe in the background, with a somber look on his face. I actually didn’t note this scene in my notes while I was watching, but everything came flooding back once I began writing about the movie from the beginning.

The band finishes their set, all their things are outside in the hallway, and they’re getting ready to get paid and leave. Sam realizes she left her phone charging on the counter in the dressing room. Pat says, “Don’t worry, I’ll get it,” and walks into the room. He unplugs her phone from the wall, turns around and is frozen in place trying to process what he just walked into.

That pretty dark haired girl? On the floor with a knife in her head. He looks to his right to see a blonde girl hysterical and 2 huge guys (who are part of the venue staff) staring back at him. Everyone is still until they aren’t, and this scene had me in a choke hold. Everything happens so fast. The 2 guys lunge at Pat trying to grab him and his phone. As this is happening, Pat dials 911 and actually gets through! He makes it out of the room and is frantically trying to explain, while slipping through the fingers of the men, that there’s been a stabbing and someone is dead. The rest of the band immediately jumps into action, trying to grab him and pull him through, and trying to move past the other 2 dudes in the hallway. But, they’re trapped. The largest guy that was originally escorting them out of the venue peeks into the room and says something along the lines of, “I told you to keep this door locked.” Gabe seems to realize what’s happened, takes Pat’s phone and makes his way out of the hallway. He says going to take care of it and everyone just has to ‘hang tight’. The band is told to wait there, guarded by the very men that might have just killed this girl.

Now, I know I said spoilers, but I can only include so many details… I’m leaving a lot out… mostly because this blog post would end up being like 10,000 words long. It’s better to see and experience the movie for yourself so you can clock all of the little details that make this movie so incredibly anxiety inducing and sick (in a good way). Long story short, they end up barricading themselves in the dressing room, quickly get acquainted with Amber, the dead girl’s friend, and begin to brainstorm how they’re going to get out of there alive.

We’re soon introduced to Darcy, who’s played by Patrick Stewart of all people. The absolute confusion when I first realized it was him was comical. I don’t think I had ever seen him in a horror movie before this one. Have any of you?? Anyway…

Darcy is no bullshit. He’s the owner and what he says goes. He makes it very clear that they’re not leaving without going through him and his goon squad. When I tell you, they are legitimately like a S.W.A.T team swarming the venue leaving no means of escape. To make matters worse, Darcy says they can use anything but guns (at first). I’m talking machetes, dogs, chainsaws… there was no holding back. They wanted zero witnesses to what happened.

There’s a quick scene before they make their first attempt to leave the room where Pat, who has lost a shit ton of blood after getting his arm butchered (agonizingly refraining from going into detail about this), where he tries to tell a story of when him and the other boys went paint balling. He explains that this situation feels similar to that day because they were paired up with ex-marines who were tactical, using hand signals, and essentially, were playing like they were really on the battlefield. I don’t know what it was about this scene, but it resonated. Like, these are just chill people who were at the wrong place at the wrong time and are now fighting for their lives. There’s a quote from Pat a little later in the movie where he references this paint ball game again and says, “They knew real war, they played real war,” and I have to admit, this was probably the best way to describe the power plays of Darcy’s men vs. the band and Amber.

Our poor 5 captives try their best to escape and take whatever they can from the dressing room to fight back, and, well… let’s just say only 3 of them return to the room. As a little hint to what happens, I don’t think I’ve seen anything as brutal as a dog tearing someone’s throat out. (Okay, maybe that one scene from the first Terrifier movie, IYKYK, but this doggo scene was pretty gnarly.)

There are some cool, quite surface level, but cool backstories that come into play that add some insight as to how and why the girl was killed and why the people that run the venue are so brutal. I kind of wish we had a weeee bit more backstory dialogue, but truthfully, the way the movie played out, I’m not mad about it.

Now, a character that had piqued my interest waaaay more was Gabe. He was the one that helped the band prepare for their set, the guy that was on the scene when they found the dead girl in the dressing room, and who informed Darcy of the situation. Essentially, Darcy’s right hand. Throughout the entire movie, even from the moment he took all of their phones when shit first went down, I couldn’t tell if this dude was going to end up helping them in some way. For reasons like the scene where we see him in the background watching the girl that was about to be murdered – his face kind of seemed to not be completely invested or committed to whatever Darcy had brewing. It was just a vibe.

In about the last 20 minutes or so of the movie, they show Gabe entering the venue with 2 guys who were expected to finish off our last 2 survivors, while he walked around cleaning up some of the mess from all of the previous brutalities. My notes were so back and forth. Every few bullet points I had, “Hm, Gabe is sus,” then a few down, I’d write, “OMG he’s totally helping them!”, then, “hm..maybe not.” This guy seriously confused me the most. I feel like he was too terrified to stand up to Darcy, but given the opportunity, without Darcy’s knowledge, would have helped them in some capacity…

In one of the final moments of the movie, there is, what I consider, an iconic quote from one of our survivors when confronting Darcy. They say, “It’s funny. You were so scary at night.” and proceeds to fuck him up. Satisfying is an understatement, especially since it takes our survivors a little too much time to start ripping through the remaining bad dudes. Oh, and remember the doggo scene I mentioned earlier? Well, the very last scene of the movie, our survivors are sitting on the ground, in disbelief that they’re alive. In the distance, you hear what sounds like chains jingling. It’s the dog. They weakly raise their guns while the dog trots right past them, not even acknowledging the empty clicks of them trying to shoot it point blank.

Literally up until the last scene of the movie, they make references to small details or talking points from earlier scenes in the movie. I always love catching things like that because sometimes you’ll forget a funny moment or smaller detail of something from the beginning, and when they refer back, it’s like a “Oh shit, nice!” moment. I really love when screenwriters come full circle with things like that.

Listen, I know this was a long one, and I really didn’t include TOO many spoilers or go in depth too much, but honestly if I did, this would be 10x as long and you wouldn’t finish reading it anyway. There was SO much that happened in those 90 minutes, it would have taken forever to go through everything scene by scene like I usually do. If you’re that curious, go watch the damn movie 😝 It’s only about 90 minutes, and honestly it doesn’t even feel that long because of the constant state of anxiety from the moment they find the dead girl. It’s literally 100mph until the very end. Everything happens so fast and there’s so much going on that it’d be difficult to effectively explain every single brutal scene in this one post.

It’s a solid 9/10 in my humble opinion. Shout out to Joey for the rec! 😊

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Xox ♡