If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

I don't have all the words right now but this film is a work of art.

Don't listen to the negative reviews

Story: It's very simple but honestly that is fine.

Do you like killer bats and undead corpses and a bit of tense horror? Those who hate- let them hate! Ti West's debut feature The Roost just arrived on DVD in the mail today, and of course I immediately popped it in for a watch. I expected it to be decent, a satisfactory low-budget horror, but it turned out to be a really great homage to 80s horror flicks.The effects were well done, in my opinion. West avoids lingering too long on certain things, so as to not draw any ire for things looking cheesy. Especially when we get one or two little gory bits, it looks really good; the practical effects added more old school feel to the film. West always relies on atmosphere for his films, which is evident when you look at his later works like The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers specifically, and here he doesn't disappoint either. The look of actually filming with film instead of digitally really pays off here, and if you didn't know better, in a few scenes you could actually mistake this for something filmed 30 years ago- and not in any bad way either.I think the acting, dialogue, the gore, the scares, the chilling score, that throwback 80s look- it all makes for a wonderful little horror film. Ti West is one of my favourites. I anxiously awaited the arrival of my DVD, having never ever seen the film before, and it has not disappointed. I'm currently watching the Special Features, right now it's The Making of The Roost, which has some great little bits with Larry Fessenden, and shows off some of the practical and digital effects the film uses. Highly recommended, and I give this an 8 out of 10 stars. I wish there were more efforts like this coming out these days; it's great to catch them when they do.P.S Tom Noonan and his segments, the horror show framing device, plus his ending = wonderful!

Four people are on their way to a wedding when they decide to take a backroad due to traffic. A bat hits their windshield causing them to wreck the car, and now they're stuck in the middle of nowhere. After walking a good ways, they realize that there's a farm down the road. Too bad for them the rest of the bats have chosen the farm's barn to roost in. Worse, the people that the bats attack turn into zombies for whatever reason, and they already attacked the elderly owners of the farm.This film takes a very threadbare plot and does nothing with it. Not that they could really do much with it to begin with, you might say, but anything can happen if you bring enough imagination and rugged ambition to the table. Alas, "The Roost" winds up being a relatively bland effort where not much happens. The bat attacks are underwhelming and sloppily handled. It's never explained why their victims become zombies. I love the unexplained, I love being left to wonder about certain things that aren't spelled out for you, but I just didn't care in this case. In fact, the film didn't give me a reason to care about much of anything. The characters are whiny too, so I couldn't really invest in them. Cult director Larry Fessenden appears very briefly as an ill-fated tow truck driver. He also served as producer. Seems like an odd fit since his films are the right kind of ambiguous, whereas this thing tries ambiguity just to be even more stripped down than it already is.The whole film has a faux "Frightmare Theater" wraparound complete with horror host, but it was more annoying than it was effective at creating any type of nostalgia. At one point, the film is stopped dead in it's tracks due to the host's antics. Really, did we need this nonsense intruding on the main tale?Even with the bare minimum of a plot, this could have been something. It seems like Mr. West just wasn't interested. There is one moment in the film that I really liked, that being when one of the teens gets into the farmhouse and looks over a bunch of pictures on the wall. The way in which West shoots this brief sequence made something so simple as looking at photos take on a certain level of uneasiness. The rest of the film was in desperate need of something like that. Excluding that one bit, this is weak stuff all around.

I don't know about the rest of you, but once I edited out the framing device, which really ruins the movie (did Ti have to do this for added "commercial" value?), that is, all the black and white inserts, like we're supposed to know we're watching a late show movie, The Roost is truly scary, in no small part thanks to the editing, the use of light and darkness (a bow to the cinematographer), and the best use of space of any genre movie of recent vintage. The ending, of course, stinks. Wish I could have been surprised, but you see this one coming, better to have left him, a la The Sopranos ending, alone on the bridge in the dark, the moon red, the bats gone, everything blocked. I confess that I had to stop watching this one several times because it is so unnerving, especially if you don't know what to expect (and this one caught me cold). What this film needs is a director's cut, and it will be a cult classic, period.

I really wanted to love this moody and minimalist zombified-by-bat-bites flick, but it was unbelievably slow-paced. It has a brooding and creepy atmosphere, but nothing occurs in the first 40 minutes except bickering amongst young folk. I appreciated that the main story went for horror and not comedy, unlike most contemporary zombie features, but that goes out the window with the fact that the movie is introduced (and interrupted) by some silly fake TV horror host. That part of the film comes across as filler, which is unfortunate in a film that already moves way to slow and has a lack of action, dialogue, etc. If 30 minutes were edited, this could make a sweet short film or TV episode.