The Roost (2004) This extremely low budget flick from director Ti West starts off with an old school TV horror host (Tom Noonan, of all people!) opening his show which is going to be showing a movie called The Roost. After a few minutes of the standard horror host shtick, the real movie begins, which sends four twentysomething nobodies off to the boonies for someone's wedding. Before they can arrive however, the car of course breaks down, stranding the quartet (all together now) out in the middle of nowhere! Making their bad night even worse, the farmhouse they go seek help from has a barn full of mutant vampire bats! And the farm's owners, already attacked and killed, are actually a second menace to Our Heroes. Which leads me to one thing I've noticed about low budget monster movies in the last few years: If your main monster is too expensive to have on screen long enough to menace everyone that needs menacing, one fall back is to have your main creature's attack turn its victim into a zombie. That way, if you only have enough money for at most three adequate CGI scenes of bats/giant spiders/cockroaches/snakes attacking plus your big climax , but you have four or six main cast members, you can glop cheap goopy zombie makeup on the first couple of victims and have them knock off a couple of the others so you can save the effects for the climax. And that's what we have here. From there, you can kind of map this one out. Breaking it all down into pluses and minues: on the plus side, it's always nice to see Noonan. There are a couple of nice jump scenes. The CGI on the bats is extremely well done, especially considering the movie's budget. Then, on the minus side: while the stuff with Noonan is kind of fun, it's also pretty obvious it's there to pad out the very brief running time (around 70 minutes minus horror host). And speaking of that brief running time, it unfortunately takes about 40 of the movie's 70 minutes to get the kids into position at the farm for the bats and zombies to attack. Also, after the movie finally does pick up, one of the horror host sequences (literally) breaks in to the movie and totally stalls the flick out for several minutes. Another problem: absolutely not one second of explanation of where the bats come from or why they are in this particular barn. I know what the filmmakers were going for here; sometimes events just start happening and people are thrown in to them and no one knows what's really going on. Sometimes this adds to the menace of the movie. In this case, however, I'm forced to put it down to sloppy or bad screenwriting. Next: if you can't see the end coming a mile off, get a new hobby. The final minus is that the movie was shot on video, then given a film look in a computer, with added grain, scratches, and even the aforementioned film break, none of which is convincing or adds much to the movie. The reason it falls fully on the minus side is because the filmmakers baldly lie in the credits that the movie was shot on film. No fibbing in the credits, fellas, unless you're making an obvious joke! So, taking a look at the totals here: pluses 3, minuses 6. It's too bad, because with a tighter script that got down to business quicker, and threw out some kind of an explanation; and the really good bat scenes used to better effect, this could have been a neat little movie. As is, not recommended.

When i seen Wil Horneff and his sister Vanessa was in a horror movie together called the roost i was hoping that it would be about Vampire bats and i was right. And it ended the way i never would thought instead of Wil's charcter that Wil played killing his sister his sister ending his life and that's what made it different from any other vampire movie i ever seen. Way to go guys.

Rondall

This movie is so bad it's not even worth watching on "fast forward".

To those of you who gave this movie a 3 star or more rating: Did we watch the same movie?!

I loved Grindhouse and it's concept but to compare this movie to Grindhouse is ludicrous. To say that this movie concept inspired Grindhouse is unbelievable.

The acting is awful. The story is awful. The production quality is awful. The attempt to mimic a "Creature Feature" type intro and movie is just awful! Taking massive amounts of hallucinogenic drugs before viewing this movie will not even help! This movie will still be awful!!!!!!!!

I've noticed that good reviews of products get high ratings and usually bad reviews get rated as "not helpful". Well, here is a BAD review because if my review can stop even one person from watching or buying this movie, it's worth it.

I have one of those wonderful devices called a DVR and I was perusing the horror films one night and this was listed with a good review and one of the more interesting lines that caught me - vampire zombie bats! Huh? That alone made me very interested in this picture.

So I watched this with my girlfriend and we were both excited to see the vampire zombie bats, she loves horror and zombies as much as I do! Well the film started out in black and white as an old Creature Feature late night horror show (with TV frame included) and I thought that was an interesting opening, then the film started and that's when my interest "flew" out the window.

Talk about a ponderous and plodding movie. My god! The writer/producer/director Ti must have been taking sedatives and I don't know how the editor stayed awake to put this mess together. The opening of the "film" is a stripe running down the road and then suddenly you hear a car crash - couldn't afford to show it obviously, then people just talk to talk and wander around pretty aimlessly around a farmhouse for a good 50 minutes before the film breaks and we go back to the horror host again. Ok, thank god, he's the only saving moment of this picture, but OH NO, he returns us to this mess. I swear I don't think I've stared outside of an open door to a barn so long in my life! The same scene repeats over and over and the "cast" more like zombies, acting wise( although there are 2 zombies in the film), just wander aimlessly in a barn and start dying. Dying from what is the question, it's sometimes hard to tell, unless you mean the poorly CGI'd bats that you never really see up close. The one you do see is late in the film and is dead but it has some nice teeth although it's obvious it's plastic, where's OZZY when you need him?

So why did I give it 2 stars? I think I liked it because my girlfriend despises it so much. If I want to put her to sleep, this film will do it! I even bought the DVD on sale for about $3 just to see her shocked expression, that I actually picked up this snoozer.

If you suffer from insomnia, trust me, this one will cure it! Great for those nights when you just "can't get to sleep." Roost away.

I really wanted to like this film, I really did! I remember watching the trailer and thinking, "For an indie horror film, this doesn't look half bad." Then I actually watched the movie. What a disappointment! Not only are all the characters in the film completely unlikable, whiny, grouchy twits who seem only able to complain about anything and everything at every moment, but what little story there is to the film is painfully drawn out and stretched so thin that you can't help but feel that this would have made a much better 20 minute short rather then the overwritten, lethargic 81 minute mess that it became. And about 15 minutes of that time is spent on some lame, horribly acted late night Horror Host who it is never really explained as to why they threw him into the film except maybe as filler for a film that was too short to be called a feature length film otherwise. I literally found myself yelling at my TV saying, "Come on already, get to the action! Get to the story!" as I tried to endure a plot as slow and boring as watching maple sap trickle down the side of a tree on a bitterly cold morning. Actually, watching maple sap would have been a lot more interesting.