Green Room

 It begins as a road movie: The Ain't Right's are on tour, living hand to mouth as they perform live shows throughout the pacific northwest, crashing on fan's couches, siphoning gas to make it to the next venue.

 Not the best way to do business, as they discover when a show falls through. Finances almost down to zero, they're faced with cancelling the tour, but the dipshit that had them come to town for nothing offers an option - play out in the boonies for a 'boots and braces' crowd - skinheads. What could possibly go wrong?

 Writer/director Jeremy Saulnier and cinematographer Sean Porter film this prologue with a beautiful naturalistic flair and a very firm handle on the day-to-day business of a tiny punk band trying to string some shows together. The band is Tiger (Callum Turner), Sam (Alia Shakwat), Pat (Anton Yelchin) and Reece (Joe Cole) - a really likeable bunch of kids even when they're (very believably) posturing about how legit they are. Their relatability is a great asset in a nasty horror movie like this.

 Once they make it to the venue things... they look all right, actually. Tense, but manageable. And their show goes well - despite the gang hilariously choosing to go with Nazi Punks Fuck Off as their opening number; "It's a cover" the lead mutters as bottles fly around him.

 They get paid and are on their way out when Pat realizes he left his phone behind on the green room - and when he gets there, there's a girl with a knife buried to the hilt in her skull. Fuck.

 So begins a standoff between the Ain't Right's and a rotating cast of heavies initially led by Gabe (Macon Blair). The film's scope narrows to just the green room initially, where the band is locked in with an armed, unfriendly brute and a fellow doomed witness (Imogen Poots), and slowly expands as the owner of the venue arrives and - Oh shit, it's Ben Kingsley Patrick Stewart! Ahem. Anyhow, he arrives to 'negotiate', and the band slowly starts realizing that their odds of survival are close to null even as they keep trying to reason with them.

 Things go even south-er almost immediately as the locals make their intentions clear with one incredibly fucked up instance of ultraviolence, and from there we follow both the punks as they try to find a way out and the skinheads as they make plans to kill them and dispose of the bodies in a way that won't get them in trouble.
 I've watched this a couple times over the years, and it always strikes me how complex the script actually is, and how well it communicates subtleties; besides the ripping horror/survival main plot, enough details are crammed in the margins to explain why that initial girl was murdered, we get a lot of character moments on both sides, funny bits of dialog and some horrifying ones as the venue management discuss the band's ultimate fate. It's a gem.

 And when things get going, they really get going. It's not a hugely gory movie, but the carnage still looms large thanks to some unusually terrifying brutality, which the camera lingers on unflinchingly. Survival of common people against hardened criminals is a common escapist movie trope, but this is no fantasy - good people get chopped up with little warning and extreme prejudice, and any reprieve is gained at horrible cost.

 The acting is great (most of the cast is British for some reason, not that you could tell), the music's excellent and the filmmaking is propulsive and even lyrical at multiple points, leading up to one very moving shot right near the end, followed by a pretty funny, silly gag. Damn near perfect little movie.

Odd Thomas

 Dean Koontz is an weird novelist. I've read a couple of his books and enjoyed them, thought they were a bit cheesy, and proceeded to forget almost everything about them; I know I've read Watchers, for example, but the few things I remember from it are from the movie, not the book. I mostly remember his stuff struck me as being a bit less horror, more fantasy adventure.

 I haven't read any of the Odd Thomas books, but going from its 2013 adaptation... yeah, doesn't look like I need to change my mind.

 As directed by Stephen Sommers (he of Deep Rising and the first couple of Mummy Movies), Odd Thomas is a horror comedy about a guy with psychic powers (Anton Yelchin) who gets pulled into a race against time to prevent some horrific events. It's pretty similar to The Frighteners (but less successful with its horror) or John Dies at the End (but less successful as a comedy and a lot less weird.) It's fine. It's fun. Perfectly enjoyable, with some cool ideas, a handful of good scenes, and at least one clever twist.

 Odd (that's actually his name) lives in the small town of Pico Mundo, CA, where he works as a fry cook with a sideline as a supernatural investigator - we first see him finding a serial killer with help from the ghost of one of the victims, and then chase him down and bring him to justice (turns out, he's done this enough that he's gotten pretty good at fighting.)

 One thing that's interesting for this sort of story is that the guy is pretty universally beloved. There's a couple of throwaway lines intended to make him seem a bit of an outsider, but pretty much all the characters in the movie either adore him or are assholes. This goes double for the police chief (Willem Dafoe!) who not only trusts Odd implicitly and is endlessly patient with his phone calls even while he's trying to get it on with his wife, but is also willing to do a spot of cover up so Odd's psychic abilities remain a secret.

 Odd doesn't just see dead people. He also senses spirits no one else can see, which kicks the plot into gear when he starts seeing bodachs swarm into his neighborhood - they kind of look like ghostly, goopy, bug-like mashups of humanoid skeletal things that skitter all over the place - at one point one of them splits into several others; it's a cool creature design! The bodachs of Scottish folklore were kid snatchers, but seeing one of them was supposed to be an omen of doom, so it tracks with their use here. As Odd explains, they can sense when something bad will happen, and come to feed on it. So their being there in such numbers can only mean bad things.

 A cool touch is that he can't let the bodachs know that he can see them. There are a few good scenes of Yelchin pretending not to see stuff that his character can see but he (the actor) can't. A wrinkle on the usual reacting to green screen playbook.

 The rest of the movie is Odd trying to work out what apocalyptic event will happen to get the bodachs all riled up. It all leads to a potentially horrifying event with many real-world parallels in the US, but it's defanged to be consistent with the rest of the movie. It's a shame, because I would have kind of loved to see this sort of movie deal with that type of more mundane horror a bit more honestly, but it really wouldn't fit Odd Thomas's relentlessly upbeat tone.

 About that tone- unfortunately, it can get a bit grating. The protagonist keeps a constant narration going, and when he's quiet, the on-screen characters feel the need to fill the silence, or else a cheesy blues riff rushes in to fill the void. It's almost manically breezy, and the script isn't always up to the task; Lots of forced quips and character moments that don't quite land successfully; the poor girlfriend character gets saddled with a lot of them. Shit gets quirky fast.

 Sommers is pretty good here, fortunately, especially when he takes a deep breath and reins in his instincts a little. Most of the scenes with the bodachs are at least a little creepy and well done, and the action beats are well handled (the fight against an angry poltergeist is a highlight.)

 He does overreach his budget often, resulting in some spectacularly dodgy CGI, but at this stage that seems to be one of his directorial trademarks even when he does have the money. When the imagery is supposed to be unreal, it works pretty well. I'm kind of angry this guy was kind of relegated to the sidelines of Hollywood, while Roland Emmerich can still get semi-big budget films greenlighted.