Simply A Masterpiece

a film so unique, intoxicating and bizarre that it not only demands another viewing, but is also forgivable as a satirical comedy where the jokes eventually take the back seat.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

Noonan is talented - check out his triple duty as the writer, director and star of 1994's WHAT HAPPENED WAS..., which features one of the most believable first kisses in movie history - so what in the world is he doing here? Either lending his star power to a needy friend, I suppose, or simply taking the money and running.THE ROOST has absolutely nothing to recommend it. The writing, directing, acting, photography, effects, makeup and scares - they're all garbage. Even Noonan's own bit as the retro TV horror host is painfully lame, and the "shock" scenes are just a handful of uninspired shaky-cam attacks by some escapees from a WALKING DEAD convention.You can - as I did - fast-forward through 90% of this sad excuse for a movie without missing anything, and the other 10% is equally worthy of oblivion.And, please, can people stop hating on bats? The bat is a docile and remarkable creature without which we'd be up to our eyeballs in mosquitoes, and the vandalism of its habitats is an ignorant crime against nature.

It's amazing how many people have jumped on the Ti West bandwagon. Reminds me of the story about the emperor's new clothes. This is by no means a good movie, nor is it particularly watchable. The direction is lazy, the premise patently stupid, and it's basically the kind of film where nothing really happens. Ever. There's a predictably stupid ending too, and you'll expect it.The framing show idea was cute, but it unfortunately also suffers from lasting far too long for what it is. It's like he's never seen a television show before; even in the 60s, those sequences did not take that long and did not drag that long.The whole experience feels like someone who has tried to make a film despite never having seen one, only heard basically what it's supposed to be like. As a result, it feels like it goes on for hours at a time, because the pacing is terrible, the acting is unexceptional, the sound engineering is nonexistent -- actors mumble all the time, but the sound effects and music are top volume -- and overall it's something that can't even be enjoyed as a sort of homage. But it's not even that. It's basically just a terrible movie from the late 60s/early 70s, except it was made now. Kind of like House of the Devil.The Innkeepers is so far the only Ti West anything that has been watchable, and it really wasn't that great. Certainly not excellent enough to justify the blind adoration so many seem to have for him in reviews and website comments. But this one? This was just boring. I couldn't even deal with having it on as background noise, it actually just bored the bejeezus out of me no matter what. And at the end of the day, if your horror movie is boring above all, you have pretty disastrously failed in that genre.

I'm not sure why Ti West has so much hype associated with him, because he's really not that good. His movies have long, boring stretches of filler, where pretty much nothing happens. His writing is so minimalistic that it's difficult to say that his movies actually have any plot to speak of. In fact, the entirety of The Roost can be summed up with one sentence: Bats turn people into zombies. That's it. This can work (several of John Carpenter's movies are highly minimalist and feature only the most essential plot elements), but -- as this movie shows -- there's a very real danger that audiences will simply become bored and leave unfulfilled.If you're big into retro 1970s/1980s horror, full of atmosphere and tension, then you might appreciate this movie more than some other audiences. I like that style, but I still found this to be a bit underwhelming, for the most part. There were some parts that I liked, but, overall, I think the Ti West hype is mostly just overexcited, loud fanboys.

In my opinion, this movie is getting a really bad rap from a lot of your viewers. Perhaps, it is because this film reminded me of the old "Fright Night" television show that appeared in Louisville, Kentucky area on Saturday nights at 7p.m. That particular show always opened with a scene of an old local Victorian style mansion embedded in a sea of fog with a short introduction by a character called the "Fearmonger" played by a local celebrity named Charlie Kissenger as he introduced one of the old 1940 Universal Horror Classics. This film seemed to try to spoof that wonderful bygone era. The actual film that followed the introduction, "The Roost" reminded me a lot like the grainy amateur style filming of the "Blair Witch Project". The fact that a group of people on their way to a wedding are attacked by a coven of vampire bats, and that once they are bitten begin to act like a bunch of zombies seem to be an entertaining spoof that served as a low budget bridge to times gone by. I for one enjoyed this film, and recommend it to anyone who like a good horror film.