Day Twenty-Six: The Roost (2005)
The Roost is an exceptionally low budget shocker that concerns a group of young adults (heading to a friend’s wedding) who run afoul a deadly roost of vampire bats. This would be awful enough, I’d imagine being eaten alive by killer vampire bats to be extremely unpleasant, except, the bats also turn you into a sort of zombie upon biting, and then the zombie can turn another person into a zombie, and before long we’ve got more bats and zombies than we know what to do with.
The Roost is not very good, in fact, its so poor in places that it plays more like a film you’d see on campus than a real theatre. The writer-director, Ti West, is obviously trying to pad a short into a feature film, and the result is some of the longest 78 minutes you’ll find at your videostore, or mailbox, or however you come about meeting your viewing needs. Among other things The Roost features a particularly pointless framing device: Tom Noonan (always welcome) appears in the beginning, middle and end to comment on the story like a host from one of those 1970s specials, or the Crypt Keeper. What this has to do with vampire bats and zombies is beyond me. The first five minutes of the film is the camera almost literally spacing out around Noonan’s castle. You may not make it all the way through this one.
Still, there’s some potential here. West is very young, and I imagine he had little to work with, and there is the occasional image that works. West has also found a slightly different menace and an effective setting for his film. The horror filmmaker Larry Fessenden executive produced and appears in The Roost, and he did the same for West’s forthcoming Trigger Man, which has already received some very favorable notices. West is also currently finishing Cabin Fever 2. If West makes it, perhaps The Roost will one day be a bizarre curiosity, until then though, its something you’d watch five minutes of before flipping the channel.
Leave a Reply