Starring: Tom Noonan, Wil Horneff, Vanessa Horneff, Karl Jacob
Category: new classic (I guess)
Plot Tags: monster, zombie, stranded and in peril
Original release: March 2005
Format viewed: DVD rental from Vulcan, of course
Directed by: Ti West
Written by: Ti West
Distributed by: unsure - DIY I think
So Ti West is easily one of my favorite directors in the scary movie genre'. "House of the Devil" and "The Innkeepers" are just wonderful works that play so well against expectation that you don't realize how unnerved you really are until you're already way deep into it. Especially in the case of "House of the Devil" where I successfully scared the crap out of myself walking past a mirror downstairs in my house. One forgets mirrors reflect things they are placed in front of, and in that case, it was my own silly self that scared my own silly self. Getting off track, basically what I'm saying is that I love his filming style and the way he puts together stories. There is a 'throwback' aspect to it that relies just as much on what is shown as it does on what you think about during and after watching his films. I admire him greatly for it.
However, The Roost is a somewhat silly and confusing exercise in throwback film making back to the road breakdown, attack of the -blank- monsters type of stuff from the 70s and 80s. Most of these were relegated to late night local TV access shows and, seeming to understand this, West has a little intro at the beginning of the film done by none other than the great Tom Noonan. Beyond that little intro thing though, the fun kind of slowly seeps out. The story basically surrounds four friends (boyfriend, girlfriend, a dude and another guy) heading to a friend's wedding. Their car craps out in the middle of nowhere and after venturing around trying to find somewhere to get help, they happen upon a farmhouse and big barn where things start to go screwy. We are already aware of the location, however, because at the start of the movie we see an elderly couple seem to be attacked by some unseen creature when they venture into said barn.
Anyway, our group of people are having that age old phone issue whilst in the middle of nowhere and since no one seems to be home at the farmhouse, they start to bicker about what to do, who should go where etc. This is where some of the issues in this film start to come out. For one, my understanding is that they worked a lot of these scenes (if not all of them) as improv without a full structured script. The bickering becomes so very annoying very quickly because (at least for me) they reminded me of improv exercises in theatre and how utterly repetitive and lame they are. So this started to get on my nerves quickly. Now, there are many 'mumblecore' type movies that I quite like, The Puffy Chair, Cold Weather etc etc so I'm not completely closed off to the style but in this case, just grates on me. The budget is clearly small but that would've been forgiven with a quasi good script.
So pretty soon we're introduced to the fact that there are big bloodthirsty vampire bats in the barn whose bites seem to turn people into zombies of some form or fashion. I think. It isn't 100% clear exactly. The group dwindles, there are epic confrontations with the bats, the zombie people and then once we think part of our group survives...well, sufficed to say, if we cared more about these people then the last part of the film would impact more. I kept thinking about the film Cabin Fever (Ti West actually directed the sequel) where this unseen virus infects a group of campers and causes them to slowly fall apart, literally. One of the many reasons why that film is so damned good is that we care for each of them in a different way, so the slow, steady decline and demise is very important, if not emotional. In this one, I figure the bats can have 'em.
No comments:
Post a Comment