Green Room is the greatest movie of all time

Green Room. Movie is good shit. Of the two movies I've seen from director Jeremy Saulnier, this and Murder Party, both are out of the park (gonna have to watch his other film, Blue Ruin, as well). While Murder Party had a literal $0 budget, Green Room is obviously spending some coinage as this cast is dope and not at all amateurish and includes Sir Patrick Stewart. The movie is intense, brutal, has a solid storyline. It is the greatest movie of all time.

Rotten Tomato Consensus: Green Room delivers unapologetic genre thrills with uncommon intelligence and powerfully acted élan.

Pros: Super engrossing with highly tense situations. Nice premise. Patrick Stewart! This guy brings it. Rest of cast is solid too. Little bit of unexpected humor in there as well.

Cons: Not super taut. A couple of things don't make a lot of sense. Pretty violent.

Gist is a bust of gig, a band of struggling punk rockers lands a show that they are warned is a little different that ends up being at a neo-Nazi venue where they play a song with the hook "Nazi punk fuck off" which the Nazi punks consider confrontational. They are run off the stage early, back into the green room where a murder has taken place. They lock themselves in and the movie then turns into a very much nontraditional home invasion flick. Reminds me of a Trump-era Your Next, also a home invasion movie with a twist, if you are familiar with that masterful piece of cinema (though it came out before all the Trump supporting racists came out of the woodwork). Directed by Saulnier, whose shit I fucking love and seems to be the new Ti West, has cemented himself as a dude whose flicks I will anticipate for sure. Staring in the film are Macon Blair (a favorite of Saulnier) who was in Blue Ruin and Murder Party, Imogen Poots from films such as 28 Weeks Later and Need for Speed, Alia Shawkat who is Maebe in Arrested Development and was in Final Girls which was one of my faves from the last few years, the Patrick Stewart, and Anton Yelchin, known for Alpha Dog, Hearts in Atlantis, and Star Trek, in one of his last roles (he died in a freak accident in 2016).

Only true complaint about the movie is that some shit that doesn't add up is why exactly the girl they stumbled upon with the knife in her head dies in the first place. I guess they sort of explain it but it is super confusing. Then the dead girl's boyfriend, also a Neo-Nazi, flips sides and starts helping the green room peeps. This too makes no real sense. I mean, it is sort of explained, but that explanation is hard to follow and pretty weak.

There are a lot of times in the movie where things appear to turn the green room people's way but then doesn't which really gets you. Like when that guy flips sides. He has info on what is going down and how they can survive and what not but then dies immediately. Bummer. Then when the group gets a shotgun you think they are going to at least take some people out. But that does no good either and ends with a horrific death.

Best scenes of the movie are also some of the hardest to watch. Like when Chekov (Yelchin) and the rest of them negotiate with Stewart and the Nazis, the gun for getting out alive, when the skinheads double cross them and nearly cut off Chekov's hand. The most satisfying scene though, in a movie without many of them, comes when Poots and Yelchin's characters are the last two standing from the room, spoiler, and they stop "playing war" and start using their noodles and do some real damage. Also like the scene at the very end when everyone is dead and this dying pit bull that has killed multiple people finds his Nazi owner, who is dead, sidles up to his guy, lays down with him, and presumably dies. Even though the dog is a terror and his master is a Nazi, I was still touched by it... Dogs are just so goddamned loyal.

MVP here is Stewart who elevates the film from punk indie to legitimate hard-hitting thriller. His Neo-Nazi is truly impressive. He is always sinister and not to be trusted. He comes off as a real leader in a totally different way than he does as Dr. Xavier. He is a Shakespeare villain who is awesomely intense and wicked. This movie probably works without him but it's not nearly the same level of film with broad appeal.

That's Green Room. You definitely should check it out. I'm pretty stoked for to watch Saulnier's other movie, Blue Ruin, as well as his new flick that is due out next month, one Hold the Dark which is coming to Netflix. It starts Blair (of course), daughter of Lisa Marie Presley one Riley Keough from Mad Max: Fury Road, Alexander Skarsgård (Skarsgård the lesser) of The Legend of Tarzan (not the Skarsgård from It which is his bro), and Jeffrey Wright from Westworld among other things. So, yeah, that shit is definitely on my radar.

Murder Party is the greatest movie of all time

When it comes to movies that boast a $0 budget, Murder Party is easily the best I've ever seen. It has sort of the same feel as Sushi Girl, if you are familiar with that piece of shit, except infinitely better with what was supposedly a $0 budget as the filmmakers also financed the film.

The production company, called The Lab of Madness, again, consists mostly of cast and crew (basically the same thing) who have been making movies together since elementary school. There is a pretty cool interview with actor Macon Blair, who play Macon (the one who dresses up as a werewolf in the movie) and director Jeremy Saulnier on Monsterfresh.com from back when the movie came out. Here they talk about self financing the film and working together (along with Christopher Sharp, the lead named Chris) from childhood on. While in high school Sandy Barnett (who plays Alexander), Paul Goldblatt (Paul), and William Lacey (Bill) would join them in these VHS movie making adventures with all of them studying film in one form or another after graduation.

After making several short films, it came time for them to create their first feature but they were unable to get any funding. So the group took matters into their own hands and just started making the movie with what they had which is awesome and the result was this master piece which turns out to be the greatest movie of all time.

Pros: Well acted especially considering unknowns. Dope special effects. Nice kills and gore. Interesting take on art/artists and grant money (know how that is). Really fun story.

Cons: Really don't have anything negative to say about this other than it was shot on digital. Great film. 

Notes: Murder Party features a guy named Chris who finds an invitation to a "murder party" dated for Halloween night, that evening, while walking home from work. After baking up some pumpkin bread with non-organic raisins in it, he goes to the party hosted by a group of artists set on killing him in hopes of getting grant money from a supposedly rich benefactor named Alexander. Things do not go as planned as people die, mostly horribly and hilariously, and what's more is that no one appreciates the pumpkin bread. As animosity and jealousy flares up among the the artists, and one brings his assistant to the performance to light his shots, Chris sees his opportunity to use the disorder to make make a break for it.

Despite the lack of budget, there are some excellent kills and the makeup is pretty groovy as well. Since they had no money to work with, the group focused their funds on making one or effects really dope. Effects artists Paul Goldblatt (whom you'll recognize as Paul) and Chris Connelly (who specialized in make up) did not disappoint. The two that really came to mind were when the guy in the werewolf mask's face catches on fire and it melts to his face (thanks to Goldblatt) and when the guy who gets the chainsaw to head (which was Connelly's handiwork). That second scene is long and brutal and looks amazing.

The movie is also super funny and does a good job of mixing in one-liners and some long setup chuckles. A lot of the jokes involve artist community humor. Basically poking fun at how pretentious people are and artists continue to roll with bad ideas and so forth. Also how cutthroat and catty it can get.

All in all, this was a super solid movie and you should really check it out. I will definitely be watching the rest of Saulnier's body of work and what he comes out with in the future.