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

 I read a couple of Dean Koontz books when I was younger - enjoyed them, thought they were a bit cheesy, and proceeded to forget almost everything about them; His stuff struck me as being a bit... lightweight, which is probably unfair since I only read three or four of his novels. I never did get to his Odd Thomas books, but going from its 2013 film adaptation... yeah, it didn't do much to change my mind. Again, not fair as the movie, at least, is aimed at the YA market.

 As directed by Stephen Sommers (he of Deep Rising and the first couple of Mummy Movies), Odd Thomas is a fairly cartoony horror comedy about a guy with psychic powers (Anton Yelchin) who gets pulled into a race against time to prevent some horrific events. And it's pretty fun! If I'd seen it as a teen, I suspect I'd have fallen in love with it. As it is, it's still pretty enjoyable: good pacing, 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 I found interesting (because it's pretty uncommon in this type 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 adore him... and the ones who don't are clearly 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 inhuman 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 fairy-like kid snatchers, but seeing one of them was supposed to be an omen of doom, so at least that tracks with their use here. As Odd explains, they can sense when something bad will happen, and come out to feed on it; Their coming out in such numbers can only mean something terrible is about to go down.

 The rest of the movie consists of Odd trying to work out what's got the bodachs all riled up. It all leads to a horrific event that could have worked very well, but it's unfortunately a bit defanged. It's a shame, because I would have preferred the movie grapple with at least some of its horror a bit more honestly, but eliding over it makes sense as anything else wouldn't really fit Odd Thomas's upbeat tone.

 About that tone- unfortunately, it can get a bit grating. The protagonist keeps a constant narration going, and when he's quiet, other on-screen characters feel the need to fill the silence, or else a cheesy blues riff rushes in to fill the void. The film attempts to be 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; The poor girlfriend character (Addison Timlin) gets saddled with a lot of them. Shit gets quirky. On the up side, it helps what nasty stuff there is hit a little harder than it would have otherwise. 

 I'm not usually a fan of Sommers's maximalist style, but it's a good fit for the material here, especially as the lower budget means that he had to rein in his instincts in a little. Most of the scenes with the bodachs are at least a little creepy, and the action beats are well handled (a fight against an angry poltergeist is a highlight.) He does overreach his budget often, resulting in some dodgy CGI, but at this stage in his career that seems to be a directorial trademark. When the imagery is supposed to be unreal, it works pretty well.

Odd Thomas had a very troubled production; It was screwed over by marketers and distributors, resulting in several lawsuits and a delay of two years before it was released... and then it bombed, badly. Feels a little unfair that people like, say, Roland Emmerich can still get semi-big budget films greenlighted, while Sommers hasn't made another film since. I hope it was by choice.