Mondo Celluloid - Review » THE ROOST (2005)

THE ROOST (2005)

**1/2

En route to a friend’s wedding, a hipster, a nerd, a jock, and a chick run their car off the road and seek help at the creepy farmhouse up the way. Everything is fine until the hipster goes exploring in the spooky barn and the foursome find themselves under attack by a swarm of vampire bats.

From the bats themselves to the sometimes underwhelming but always satisfyingly gruesome make-up effects, writer/director Ti West’s The Roost is as silly as it is scary, and it is often both. A film that relies more on mood than action, The Roost can drag at times, a situation which is not helped by the Pinter-style pauses in the dialogue. Despite this, however, the film does manage to serve up some pretty good scares. It feels more like something that would have come out in 1975 rather than 2005 and seems to revel in it with an opening credit sequence worthy of an H.P. Lovecraft movie and a lighting and production design that feels decidedly last century, not to mention a fairly convincing avoidance of modern technology

We never really learn the origin of the bats, or how they’ve managed to go unnoticed for so long in the barn, but none of that seems very important. One thing we do know for sure: they’re not going to make it to that wedding.

Eerie, campy, and stylish, this is not a film I would want to watch alone at night. This was two dollars in the Blockbuster bargain bin that were definitely well spent.

- Shannon Roberts
June 10, 2009