Funny, strange, confrontational and subversive, this is one of the most interesting experiences you'll have at the cinema this year.

At first rather annoying in its heavy emphasis on reenactments, this movie ultimately proves fascinating, simply because the complicated, highly dramatic tale it tells still almost defies belief.

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

The biggest problem with this movie is it’s a little better than you think it might be, which somehow makes it worse. As in, it takes itself a bit too seriously, which makes most of the movie feel kind of dull.

I wondered how I had missed an effort by the usually brilliant Ti West for over a decade, especially since the intro, so humorously filled with spooky old Hollywood themes (including a tombstone in a 19th century graveyard that without a trace of subtlety says YOU lol) seemed like a promising horror comedy... It has all the tropes, including a distinct modernized Night of the Living Dead feel, which will appeal to those of us who have seen too many horror films, and a truly eerie soundtrack which reminded me of NASA Sounds of the Planets on YouTube. ..but for all of this somehow the film drags and you just don't care about any of the bitchy, whiny 20- something main characters at all. Fun background flick for Halloween season or a one time necessary viewing for die hard horror fans, but as a stand-alone film it seriously falls flat. Everything else I've seen of his is so good I wonder if this was his college film class project.

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.

This movie is nothing short of absolute garbage. The corny old style horror host leads us into a movie that is even worse. After about 30 minutes of trying to develop a nonexistent plot and one dimensional characters we finally get to the bats. At this point we find that the bats' bite turns people into some kind of zombie vampire like things (which apparently look just like normal people). Okay, this movie might still have a chance, zombies are cool right? Well, they might be if we ever saw them again. The rest of the movie consists of the characters babbling, or sitting around, or walking around with some dramatic music only to have nothing happen. Not only is this movie uninteresting, it also isn't scary. The few times something actually does attack it can be seen coming from a mile away and usually ends with no more than a single bite. On top of how horrible the script and acting is the film looks like it was shot with some leftover equipment from the Vietnam era. I can understand if the director wanted to give the movie an older look but, in the end it just ends up looking bad and sounding worse. This movie completely fails to pay homage to the 70's style "B" horror movie to which it is modeled after. If your going to produce a low budget film you should at least try and write a script that can old the attention of an audience. If you want to see a good old style zombie flick just go get yourself a copy of any George Romero movie and pass on "The Roost".

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.