MOVIE REVIEW

Vampire tale gets a different spin.

By Kevin Crust, Times Staff Writer

"The Roost," writer-director Ti West's homage to low-budget '70s horror movies, places a premium on tension while taking a fresh bite out of the old vampire-bat tale. Full of genuine scares and impressively disturbing effects, the film follows the travails of a quartet of young people stranded on a stormy Halloween night in the Pennsylvania countryside who discover that traffic might not be such a bad thing.

Taking a shortcut on a rural road, Elliot (Wil Horneff), Trevor (Karl Jacob), Brian (Sean Reid) and Allison (Vanessa Horneff) strike something that appears to be a large bat, leaving their car in a ditch. They wander to a nearby farmhouse, where they discover the barn to be a haven for a colony of winged, furry flying things, and bad things begin to occur, foreshadowed by an unsettlingly furious flapping sound.

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West punctuates the action with a framing device, featuring the understated Tom Noonan as the ghoulish host of a late-night television horror program, which is initially effective but eventually wears out its welcome.

The film was executive produced and includes a cameo by cult filmmaker Larry Fessenden ("Habit," "Wendigo"), though it lacks the quirky subversiveness of Fessenden's revisionist horror films and feels stretched beyond capacity at 80 minutes. West and his collaborators, cinematographer Eric Robbins, sound designer Graham Reznick and composer Jeff Grace, however, know how to craft a scary tale and mine their limited budget for maximum chills.

"The Roost," unrated. Running time: 1 hour, 20 minutes. At Laemmle's Fairfax, 7907 Beverly Blvd., L.A., (323) 655-4010.