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Movie Review: The Roost

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By: DThompson | in: Movies |

Not Just Another Low Budget Vampire Zombie With Annoying Teenagers Movie

Remember when you were a kid how you thought you could turn into a vampire by being bitten by a vampire bat? I know, we were all so misinformed, weren’t we? Ann Rice conclusively proved that you have to be bitten either by a gay southern gentleman or Tom Cruise to become a vampire.

The Roost

The Roost, a low budget vampire film dares to fly (or should I say “flap”) in the face of established vampiric wisdom and takes you straight back to your ridiculous childhood fantasies. Actually, well beyond your fantasies because these bats don’t make vampires, they make a sort of gooey mutant vampire/zombie hybrid. It’s pretty cool!
At first The Roost, as directed, written and edited (but not produced) by Ti West, seems like a kind of horror take on Kicking And Screaming. You know, brainy college age types yammer incessantly, mostly about how much they hate their lives and their friends. If this was a setup to make me relish their upcoming deaths it worked fantastically well. But, it seemed more like some not-so-inpired dialogue.
Hey, this is a low budget movie, folks.
The Roost makes full use of bats flitting suddenly through the frame and sometimes dive bombing directly into the camera. As in many horror films, there’s a relentlessly quivering string section. In fact, the strings often descend into a kind of “nails on the chalkboard” screech that’s unnerving all in itself.
Convincingly gory effects range from the bats to smoking and or dripping gunshot wounds to torn open throats. Great fun, if you like that sort of thing, and really who doesn’t?
The film features a kind of meta-cinema approach where a bookending host of a creature feature is used to introduce the movie (which he calls “truly wretched”) and later seems to take some part in the reality of the characters. It could have been pretentious arty crap, but it ends up being amusing pretentious arty crap. The host is played by the guy who was the serial killer in Manhunter and it’s fun to watch a pretty good actor stumble through  lines like “Delve into your deepest and darkest indulgences.” Whatever that means.
So, you spend the first half of The Roost being afraid of the bats and the bad dialogue and the second half being afraid of the bats and the undead zombie vampires. And, when you’re not afraid, you can always make ruthless fun of the film’s many shortcomings. This is one fun movie!
As for the DVD extras, there’s a making of reel that must have been a real blast at the wrap party. After that is a kind of lecture on bats called Bats: Our Leathery Friends that’s at least twice as much fun as it sounds (2 X 0 = 0). Finally comes Ti West’s student film, Prey, which is mostly two guys running through the snowy woods but still manages to be a worthwhile view.

VERDICT: Highly rentable.

[Buy the DVD on Amazon]


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Posted on January 31, 2007

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