Alia Shawkat – Tripping Through Gateways

Green Room is one of Anton Yelchin’s final films. The story is simple. Pat and his friends are in a punk band. When their show falls through, they get a new gig in a remote club. They discover it is a Neo-Nazi bar. When they stumble upon a terrible crime, it is a fight for survival.

Once things start, the film is unrelentingly intense as the band fights for survival, along with a young woman who may or may not be on there side. The film is full of surprises and the performances are great. Yelchin’s performance as Pat (who starts out a quiet and peaceable young man then forced to fight) is solidly sympathetic. The absolute stand out is Patrick Stewart. As the head of the Neo-Nazi group, Darcy, he is unnervingly menacing. I am used to the kindly and wise characters Stewart has played for over two decades. None of that is here. He is cruel, manipulative and lethally skilled.

Imogen Poot’s plays Amber as a mystery. Is she trying to help the band, or is she actually devoted to Darcy and his crew?

The film takes many twists and turns, constantly giving you hope for success only to have it taken away in a shocking moment. Writer/Director Jeremy Saulnier shows a real understanding for creating tension. His first feature film, Murder Party was an amusing horror/comedy about a lonely guy invited to a costume party that turns out to be a a group of psychopaths who invite people to hunt and kill. Using a similar premise of innocents trapped by psychopaths, he trades in humor for intensity.

Green Room is a tense and exciting thriller that keeps the viewer engaged right up to the end.

You can go one of two ways with a horror comedy. Either you can show your disdain for the genre by mocking it…or you can pay a generous homage to it. Todd Strauss-Schulson’s The Final Girls goes the second route, and it pays off.

The film tells the story of Max (Taissa Farmiga) whose mother Nancy (Malin Ackerman) is a struggling actress whose biggest claim to fame was a slasher film from 20 years ago. Upon losing her mother in a car wreck, Max has quietly moved on as best she can. She is begged by Duncan (Thomas Middleditch, Silicon Valley) to attend a special screening of the first two films in the franchise that made her mother famous.

In a freak accident Max, her friends Gertie (Alia Shawkat, Arrested Development), Vicki (Nina Dobrev, the Vampire Diaries), Chris (Alexander Ludwig, the Hunger Games and oddly enough a completely different film called Final Girl) and Duncan find themselves trapped within the original Camp Bloodbath. As they try to survive the film, Max finds an opportunity to reconnect with her mother through her character Amanda. This is a lot more effective than I expected. Farmiga and Ackerman connect quite well.

The film manages to have fun with the tropes of the genre and earn their laughs. Rather than go for Scary Movie Parody, the jokes are smarter and more fun. Also, while acknowledging the exploitation elements of slasher films, the film itself tends to avoid cheap nudity. There is a gag where a way to attract the killer of the film, Billy, a woman needs to just start stripping. Plenty of directors would have used this as a cheap excuse for gratuitous nudity, yet the nudity is all off-screen.

The Final Girls is a horror comedy worth seeing.

Tag: Alia Shawkat

Green Room Serenade (Green Room, 2016)

Down to the Last One (The Final Girls, 2015)