Green Room Review: you are lucky to get out alive (or you are dumb when you are young)

My story: When I was eighteen, I got thrown out of the house ( quite a funny story for some time). I didn’t have money. My mother left me some. But my aunt controlled it and she was holding on to it. So I moved to the city, with an allowance of two hundred euro a month.
It paid the rent and not much more. 
Fortunately, my friend was an idiot like me. Her parents had a flourishing business, she was very spoiled and decided that it was that time for a bit of rich girl rebellion. Rob was his name. Now Rob was thirty years old. He wore a long black coat and black boots and a black hat that covered his bald spot and was the fist psycho I met.
Other than dating young girls, he filled his jobless days rolling joints and spinning tales.  He could lie like nobody’s business. His favorite story was about this one passionate affair he had with the love of his life. With this mythical woman, who put all other women to shame.  One thing about teenage girls. They are competitive as hell. And this well rounded predator, knew that a young girl would do anything to prove him wrong.  So my friend, ran away from home, to move in with the bozo. 
I knew that was a bad idea. I told her father,  I bargained with him. He wouldn’t call the police on them, if she would come to live with me. So she moved in with me. Rob too. She had her bozo, I had some money and it was all good.
It strange how everything is perfectly normal when you are eighteen. 
Almost everything.
Now Rob was a popular guy, he had lots of friends. I don't know what he was other than a bozo, a predator and bald, but they were all psychobillies, with enormous pompadours, and so many spiderweb tattoos that they could cure malaria.
I met a psychobilly named Okki, more psycho like Rob than billy and his friend Fred who was nice, clue to the many tattoos of his cats and his many cats.  The five of us used to watch Grease, only two, the badder the better, listen to King Kurt and read comics that only made sense when you were stoned. 
On friday night we used to go to this bar called Cinderella. Everyone who was not a skinhead, stood at our side of the bar. It was there that I was scared for the first time in my live. I used to play rugby and my mom was already dead, so I didn’t think much could get me. But on friday nights in that bar, pretending that those guys, on the other side of the bar, would respect boundaries  I started feeling old. If old means that you start to use your effing head for something else than proving to guys how worth it you are.

Some time later, in this other place, Nighttown, literally the place where everybody who was still awake at five at night came to party, I saw my first hardcore skin concert. The girls kept kicking everybody back who wanted to quit the pogoing crowd. There were some poor punk boys wandering around, defiant and scared. I am pretty sure that night somebody attacked them outside.  Now it all seems so strange to me. How I am not sure.  I heard the word knife, and I have just this vague recollection that somebody went outside to follow those boys. But when I came outside the sun was shining and my friends were playing frisbee. 
It was a short period in my life when my idiocy trumped everything. When I walked into the lions den scared, but never ever thinking I could just go to bed.  Fortunately it was short lived. Cinderella closed, Nighttown closed. My friend moved back home, she is now married with three kids. I saw Rob once more, he shaved his head. He said he was a skin now. I am certain it was to cover his ever growing bald spot and to get in to the pants of the skin girl with him. She was seventeen.
I went to college, the money came through, I found two cats and met my fist boyfriend. Nothing really bad ever happend. 


Green room movie review


The movie: Yesterday I went to see Green Room directed by Jeremy Saulnier. It brought it all back. It’s about a Fidlar-like punkie band, three guys and a girl, who without money, siphoning gas from other cars, travel to play gigs, that don’t pay much. Dumb and convinced as they are, they refuse to rely on social media, so they can only blame themselves for they lack of succes. They want to live this pure punk rock life. The moment they decide to go home, flat broke, they get a gig outside Portland, playing in a skinhead club. They start off their set by playing the Dead Kennedy's Nazi punks fuck off , and it doesn’t go down so well. But you have admire their courage and they finish their concert with 350 dollars in their pockets and the doubtful honor or winning over the pogoing skins.
The next band is almost up, they are out of the door, when Sam played by Alia Shawkat and her gorgeous freckles notices her missing phone. They walk back to the the green room and there’s a dead girl lying on the floor. The door closes behind them and from there on, they have to climb out their youthful punky haze, and come to the realization that they saw something they shouldn’t and are now surrounded by a bunch of bald not law abiding citizens.
Green room is scary, effective, brutal, funny, kick-ass and hard to take. If that is your thing, watch Blue Ruin Jeremy Saulnier excellent other thriller first, and then sit back and scream you heart out with this one.

Green Room Imogen Poots

Remember Fairuza Balk in American History X? She was great, but Imogen Poots sure makes an impression as the stoic skinhead chick locked up with the band. Patrick Stewart, a gentle soul in real life, plays a ruthless, calculating capo di tutti i skinheads, but again Poots is the standout in this one. 

Warning if you love dogs this is a difficult one, but it gets one detail very right at the end. 

This is the scariest action/thriller/horror movie to come out this year. If you can stomach it, go see it!