I actually saw the premier to this one - the first movie premier I've ever been to. I feel all proper. This is an excellent slashy horror, with ample black humour and a large does of Patrick Stewart being a disturbingly convincing Nazi.
Opening with the necessary group of young people (these ones are in a band), we find them driving around and playing for small crowds and stealing petrol. There is a great establishing shot of their van, taken from above, with corn all around and an arching path running away from it to the road. Clearly the driver has fallen asleep, but we don't need to be told that so we just get to watch the rising sun on the tops of the corn as they wave to the wind. The are booked for what turns out to be a dud, but the interestingly haired guy said that he knew a place where they can get a well paying gig. It's full of white supremacists, but ah well.
Things quickly fall to pieces when one of them witness a murder that the owner of the club wants to cover up, and most of the movie is spent under siege in the green room. We get into the violence suddenly and brutally and there's a lot of gore, which you may not be expecting as the film is difficult to place genre-wise.
The gore effects are good, and the acting is pretty great (awesome from Patrick), but what this movie excels at is its cinematography. Now and then there is a closeup so intense that the background noises become muted and a ghostly choir plays. Mundane objects become the focus of intense scrutiny and are shown in huge detail while simultaneously being reduced to the core of what they feel like. My favourite example of this is with the closeup of the rough surface of an amp, with the unfocused shapes of raving skinheads in the background to a song that we can't hear. All I thought at the time was "how beautiful", but I could also almost feel the rough gritty texture of the amp - and that really is one of the first things I think of when I think of amps, and this film transmits texture in this one shot better than in almost any other that I've seen.
The cuts are also excellent, jolting the viewer from one extreme of light, space, or sound, to another. At one point one of the band members lowers a needle to a record, and music blares for a split second before we cut from the neon glow of the party to the soft light from the rising sun to see the silent aftermath.
As the plot fills with bodies, there are some fine death sequences, and the characters drop off in an order that never fails to surprise. It's a self-aware film, and some of its jokes have a subtle 'Scream' quality to them. The characters are all full of life and the situation also isn't wholly unbelievable, which lends the characters' actions yet more believably. I particularly enjoyed the down on his luck, yet hopeful and somewhat business-like punk guy who interviews them in the beginning, and the manager of the club, who never gets involved physically other than to mop up some of the blood, and who ends up walking to the nearest town and turning himself in. Stewart also gives a great performance as the lead Nazi; a guy I get the impression used to be a real violent psycho, but has since mellowed out into a nice old organised crime organiser. He manages to be very creepy as he's talking through the door to the green room, and then very weak looking at the end as he's caught in the forest.
Overall a very good horror/thrillery type thing. The ending even defies convention, as the groupie cuts off the last surviving band member before he can make the obligatory tying-it-all-together statement: "tell it to someone who gives a fuck".
Green Room: 69.1