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 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.