thalassafischer 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.

Paul Magne Haakonsen Where to begin? There were just so many things wrong in this movie. Well, let's start with the fact that I made it 40 minutes into the movie and nothing, absolutely nothing had happened to keep me interested. So I turned it off out of sheer and pure boredom.And the quality of the movie just felt like it was shot on someone's personal digital video camera. It was gritty and dark, and very far from a proper movie production. When I buy a movie I expect a certain level quality.In the 40 minutes I suffered through, two (possibly three) deaths had occurred, but we had seen nothing of it. So it was a borefest of epic proportions.The acting in "The Roost" was mediocre at best. And it felt like some of the actors didn't fully buy into this movie themselves.I will never make a return trip to finish this incredibly dull movie, and it will now stand to collect dust in my collection.

Matt Kracht I'm not sure why Ti West has so much hype associated with him, because he's really not that good. His movies have long, boring stretches of filler, where pretty much nothing happens. His writing is so minimalistic that it's difficult to say that his movies actually have any plot to speak of. In fact, the entirety of The Roost can be summed up with one sentence: Bats turn people into zombies. That's it. This can work (several of John Carpenter's movies are highly minimalist and feature only the most essential plot elements), but -- as this movie shows -- there's a very real danger that audiences will simply become bored and leave unfulfilled.If you're big into retro 1970s/1980s horror, full of atmosphere and tension, then you might appreciate this movie more than some other audiences. I like that style, but I still found this to be a bit underwhelming, for the most part. There were some parts that I liked, but, overall, I think the Ti West hype is mostly just overexcited, loud fanboys.

merklekranz Merlin Tuttle presents a feature on the DVD about the importance of bats to our ecosystem, that is both informative and entertaining. Unfortunately "The Roost" presents bats in stereotypical fashion as evil. The worst part of all this is that the movie is minimalist entertainment, minimal lighting, minimal logic, minimal storyline, minimal character development, minimal meaningful dialog, and minimal steady camera. All this adds up to not much more than one would expect from a zombie film. The bats get another bad reputation exposure, really for no reason, as "The Roost" relies on such minimalist material that it is barely watchable. - MERK