ChanFamous I wanted to like it more than I actually did... But much of the humor totally escaped me and I walked out only mildly impressed.

SeeQuant Blending excellent reporting and strong storytelling, this is a disturbing film truly stranger than fiction

Freeman This film is so real. It treats its characters with so much care and sensitivity.

Phillipa Strong acting helps the film overcome an uncertain premise and create characters that hold our attention absolutely.

Walter Goldenberg Noonan is talented - check out his triple duty as the writer, director and star of 1994's WHAT HAPPENED WAS..., which features one of the most believable first kisses in movie history - so what in the world is he doing here? Either lending his star power to a needy friend, I suppose, or simply taking the money and running.THE ROOST has absolutely nothing to recommend it. The writing, directing, acting, photography, effects, makeup and scares - they're all garbage. Even Noonan's own bit as the retro TV horror host is painfully lame, and the "shock" scenes are just a handful of uninspired shaky-cam attacks by some escapees from a WALKING DEAD convention.You can - as I did - fast-forward through 90% of this sad excuse for a movie without missing anything, and the other 10% is equally worthy of oblivion.And, please, can people stop hating on bats? The bat is a docile and remarkable creature without which we'd be up to our eyeballs in mosquitoes, and the vandalism of its habitats is an ignorant crime against nature.

moonmonday It's amazing how many people have jumped on the Ti West bandwagon. Reminds me of the story about the emperor's new clothes. This is by no means a good movie, nor is it particularly watchable. The direction is lazy, the premise patently stupid, and it's basically the kind of film where nothing really happens. Ever. There's a predictably stupid ending too, and you'll expect it.The framing show idea was cute, but it unfortunately also suffers from lasting far too long for what it is. It's like he's never seen a television show before; even in the 60s, those sequences did not take that long and did not drag that long.The whole experience feels like someone who has tried to make a film despite never having seen one, only heard basically what it's supposed to be like. As a result, it feels like it goes on for hours at a time, because the pacing is terrible, the acting is unexceptional, the sound engineering is nonexistent -- actors mumble all the time, but the sound effects and music are top volume -- and overall it's something that can't even be enjoyed as a sort of homage. But it's not even that. It's basically just a terrible movie from the late 60s/early 70s, except it was made now. Kind of like House of the Devil.The Innkeepers is so far the only Ti West anything that has been watchable, and it really wasn't that great. Certainly not excellent enough to justify the blind adoration so many seem to have for him in reviews and website comments. But this one? This was just boring. I couldn't even deal with having it on as background noise, it actually just bored the bejeezus out of me no matter what. And at the end of the day, if your horror movie is boring above all, you have pretty disastrously failed in that genre.

C.H Newell Do you like killer bats and undead corpses and a bit of tense horror? Those who hate- let them hate! Ti West's debut feature The Roost just arrived on DVD in the mail today, and of course I immediately popped it in for a watch. I expected it to be decent, a satisfactory low-budget horror, but it turned out to be a really great homage to 80s horror flicks.The effects were well done, in my opinion. West avoids lingering too long on certain things, so as to not draw any ire for things looking cheesy. Especially when we get one or two little gory bits, it looks really good; the practical effects added more old school feel to the film. West always relies on atmosphere for his films, which is evident when you look at his later works like The House of the Devil and The Innkeepers specifically, and here he doesn't disappoint either. The look of actually filming with film instead of digitally really pays off here, and if you didn't know better, in a few scenes you could actually mistake this for something filmed 30 years ago- and not in any bad way either.I think the acting, dialogue, the gore, the scares, the chilling score, that throwback 80s look- it all makes for a wonderful little horror film. Ti West is one of my favourites. I anxiously awaited the arrival of my DVD, having never ever seen the film before, and it has not disappointed. I'm currently watching the Special Features, right now it's The Making of The Roost, which has some great little bits with Larry Fessenden, and shows off some of the practical and digital effects the film uses. Highly recommended, and I give this an 8 out of 10 stars. I wish there were more efforts like this coming out these days; it's great to catch them when they do.P.S Tom Noonan and his segments, the horror show framing device, plus his ending = wonderful!

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.