Plot
Four friends on their way to a wedding
on Halloween find themselves stranded at a remote barn. Even worse for them
is that the barn is home to a colony of vampire bats that turn anyone they
bite into ravenous zombies.
Review
There's a little sub-genre of killer bat films now and
the question has to be begged of why? The notion of killer bats shouldn't really scare anyone
and The Roost does it's damned hardest to back my theory up. It's
clearly made by a bunch of people with a love for the genre. There are
plenty of nods to the likes of George A. Romero and the film tries it's best
to turn into one of those low budget straight-to-video cult films of the
80s. However the problem is that these people clearly don't love the genre
that much to leave it alone! There's been a lot of positive praise for this
flick and I watched it with baited breath because a lot of hyped films have
failed to deliver. Score The Roost into that column.
Unlike Bats, which was
equally as feeble in the scare department, The Roost doesn't explain
the appearance of the flying fiends. In fact not a lot of things are
explained or fleshed out. The plot is as flimsy and as basic as it needs to
be. The characters are all given some token development early on before the
carnage begins. Unfortunately the audience has no emotional
connection to this bunch of characters so bland and devoid of individuality
and intellect and so the whole affair turns into a long drawn-out saga. We
don't care when one character is turned into a zombie because we don't know
them well enough to give a damn. Maybe it's because I'm so used to seeing
stereotypes and cardboard cut out characters that this group of ordinary
teenagers just doesn't capture anyone's attention.
The whole story about the bats is padded out by
segments about a horror host introducing the film as if it were part of some
late-night horror show. Whilst I welcome the addition of creepy-looking
character actor Tom
Noonan to any flick, the scenes with him
introducing the film, appearing during an intermission and then popping up
at the end to wrap the film up seem like gross padding. This isn't some horror
anthology that needs a wraparound story to link everything together so I
don't see the need to include these bits, save for the extra few minutes of
running time they could tag on. At 80 minutes, it's already scraping the barrel
as much as it can and it feels terribly slow at times. You'd think the
director would want to hurry up the talking and searching around and get
down to the action as soon as possible. But there's lots of filler to keep
us yawning. If the director was hoping to crank up the tension before he got
to the action, then he has surely failed. One possible solution would have been to cut down the bats story a little
bit more (in fact a lot more could have been cut quite easily) and
maybe tacked on another short film to make a double feature. It would have
at least
made more appropriate use of the "horror host" that's for sure. Noonan gets
top billing even though his screen time is minimal but at least it's a fun
rip on those ghastly late-night horror show presenters that try and hype up
the terrible film of the week.
The film is eerily shot and the barn at least
looks like a decent setting for a horror film with various rooms, levels and
places to hide and crawl into. It's quite dark and in some scenes it's clear
that only the limited natural light available has been used. At least the
film looks like it was one of those cheap and nasty straight-to-video flicks
that it was aiming to be, complete with grainy shots and sporting a slightly
de-colourised look that makes it look like an old VHS that has been watched
numerous times from the local video store. The bats themselves are CGI but
they're not really flapping around that much to really worry about. And
there's surprisingly little gore too. Given that we've got zombies as well
as vampire bats, the film was aching for a bit more of the red stuff. I
guess this is the overriding problem with the film though in that it clearly
wanted to be something more than it was meant to be. It takes almost an
eternity to get to the bats and by that time, the film is nearly two thirds
over. There are few shocks and scares. In the past, horror films tended to
go down the gore route when they ran out of scares. It looks like the guys
here ran out of money before they could even get started on a route!
Verdict
The Roost is one of the most
boring horror films I can safely say I've ever seen. It's a slow, painful
and tedious affair that promises plenty but delivers little except false
promises. It tries to appeal to fans of old school low budget horror films
by going along the same route but they were never this dull. You're best off
going back and watching one of them from the 80s to see how they were
properly made.
