ROAR (1981)

 

DIRECTED & WRITTEN by Noel Marshall 

STARRING - Noel Marshall as Hank, Tippi Hedren as Madeleine, Melanie Griffith as Melanie, John Marshall as John, Jerry Marshall as Jerry,  Kyalo Mativo as Mativo

PLOT - Hank is an American naturalist living on a nature reserve in Tanzania with a whole pride of Lions, Tigers, Panthers and other assorted "big cats". Hank lives a peaceful blissful life at one with nature, his calling in life has upset his family though - consisting of his wife Madeleine, thier daughter Melanie and thier two sons John and Jerry. With this in mind Hank's family fly from the city to spend some time with him.

However, Hank is having some trouble with big game hunters straying onto the reservation and has to go with his guide - a local man named Mativo - into the nearby town to sort out some business. This means Hank is not around when his family arrive.

Arriving at Hank's home his frightened family find that it's been overrun by wild ferocious Lions. Wild ferocious Lions that have them surrounded...

PERFORMANCES - Roar isn't a horror movie, neither is it a sci-fi film, it's not even an exploitation movie (although it has kind of been marketed as one over the years), so what the hell am I doing reviewing what is essentially a Born Free rip-off on this blog ?

The answer is - because Roar holds a special place in cinema history as being THE most dangerous film shoot that's ever occurred. During the course of filming this ill advised venture, over seventy cast and crew members where injured (some severely) by the wild and untamed big cats that where the main stars of the movie. To say it was a health and safety officer's worst nightmare is selling it short.

The utter maniac behind this exercise in cast endangerment was it's writer/director/star Noel Marshall (who also plays the main character Hank). To be fair to him he had his heart in the right place, Marshall and his wife Tippi Hedren had a deep and genuine love for big cats (they'd raised several in thier own home) and wanted to make this film to educate the audience about how big cats are being endangered by greedy horrible human beings hunting them. 

The problem wasn't Marshall's good intentions, it was more the fact that many of the Lions, Tigers and Panthers used in the shoot hadn't been trained (some hadn't even been around humans or had been rescued from places where they'd been mistreated). Ok, so some of the animals where ones that had been reared by Marshall and his family but most of them where a completely unknown quantity. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see why this might, possibly, be a very, very bad idea. What's that they say about the road to Hell being paved with good intentions ? Whoever coined that phrase probably had this film in mind...

To make matters even worse Marshall then goes on to put his own ACTUAL real life family at risk. That's right - Hank's onscreen wife and kids are actually Marshall's own - wife Tippi Hedren, his sons John and Jerry (sounds like some kind of cartoon) and Hedren's daughter - a teenaged Melanie Griffith (I never knew the woman from The Birds was Melanie Griffith's mum until I watched this film), all of Marshall's nearest and dearest where put in the proverbial firing line of being potentially torn limb from limb by some of mother nature's deadliest predators.

As a result of the circumstances of the filming there's really not a lot I can say about the actual acting performances. The characters themselves are basically fictionalised versions of Marshall and his family (albeit more two dimensional), this semi-autobiographical approach becomes even more apparent when you realise that for a good eighty percent of the film the various cast members are being mauled by Lions and look absolutely BLOODY TERRIFIED !

The only person who doesn't seem affected is Marshall himself who doesn't seem to give a second thought to wading into the middle of a group of Lions that are having a proper serious looking fight (needless to say he never comes out of it unscathed). All the other cast members from Hedren, to the Marshall brothers to the young Melanie Griffith all look like they're having serious second thoughts about the whole project. John Marshall has since gone on record as saying that he still has nightmares about appearing in the film to this day and that his dad was an "asshole" for putting his family through the stress and danger of the shoot.

Of particular note is Mativo (playing Mativo funnily enough), a native to Tanzania who has the distinction of being the ONLY cast member not to become severely injured during the making of the film, obviously he was more used to being around big cats and probably knew better than to go around pissing them off, hence him escaping unscathed. He still looks like he's absolutely bricking it every moment he's onscreen though.

VIOLENCE - This is probably the only film I've ever reviewed on this site that has 100 percent genuine bloodshed depicted onscreen (it's probably the only "family film" I've reviewed on here either, which makes the preceding sentence seem even more bizarre).

There's some moments of scripted violence, like the scene where the big game hunters shoot a few Lions (in these moments it's fake blood galore. The Lions have obviously only been shot with tranquilliser pellets, you can see that they're clearly still breathing), but other than a few moments in the film everything else you see is pretty much for real.

Some of the most notable real moments then...

Early in the film Marshall runs into the middle of a pair of fighting Lions, you see him clearly get his hand swiped by one the animal's front paws. Marshall bleeds for real on camera. There's moments where you even see his gored hand in closeup shots.

Marshall was to sustain many more injuries over the eleven years it took them to make this movie - at one point he had so many wounds that they became infected and he had to be treated for gangrene.

Tippi Hedren also gets injured on camera when she gets thrown off an enraged Elephant's back - she apparently broke her ankle in the fall but completed the scene in question. Hedren was also hospitalised due to infected wounds at one point as well.

Worst of all is the scene where Melanie Griffith gets mauled onscreen by a Lion. At one point you actually hear her shout "Noel" to try to get Marshall to stop filming (he didn't).

Off screen Griffith received more wounds, she got swiped in the face and nearly lost her eye. She had to undergo cosmetic surgery to hide the scars. Melanie Griffith is no stranger to the plastic surgeon's knife these days but back then she was only a fresh faced 17 year old. Needless to say it probably WASN'T the introduction to the world of plastic surgery that she was planning on...

Worst of all was cameraman Jan De Bont who got his scalp ripped off by a big cat's jaws. He had to have 120 stitches in his head, but undaunted he went back to the set and completed the film. That's dedication.

Another cameraman was mauled so badly it was actually touch and go whether he'd survive for a while. It really is a miracle that nobody was killed.

I'm a cat lover myself and sometimes for fun I like to wind my cat (Fred) up (in an affectionate way, I don't do anything cruel to him, he just gets a bit grumpy when you tickle his stomach is all), for my troubles I usually get a swipe from his claws and a scratch on my hand. This is just natural cat behaviour and the big cats in Roar are just doing what comes naturally to them. The difference being if I annoy Fred I'm not going to get potentially eviscerated. Everyone involved in this film should really have known better.

RATING - Roar is not a great film by any stretch of the imagination - the story is extremely basic, the so-called "comedy" moments are desperately unfunny and the whole thing ends with a sheen of typical Hollywood cheesiness.

BUT - watching a bunch of clueless actors that are way, way, waaayyyyy out of thier depth is undoubtedly extremely entertaining. There are moments as well where your heart will be in your mouth as you just sit there thinking to yourself "what the actual HELL where they playing at ?" There's some genuinely edge of the seat moments when you know the circumstances of this utterly insane film shoot.

The whole film just has this sense of utter chaos surrounding it. You can't help but admire it in it's own weird way. 

3 and a half enraged kings of the beasts out of 5. Entertaining...but for all the wrong reasons. Born Free on acid basically.

ART - Even the way this film was promoted by it's poster and video art tells it's own strange story.

To begin with Roar was promoted as a Disney-esque knockabout family comedy...

Then, once the story got out about everything that went on behind the scenes it was promoted as more of a horror/thriller movie...

Finally - in more recent years it's pretty much been marketed as a kind of exploitation/found footage/virtual "snuff" movie with the emphasis being placed very much on the real life maiming of various cast and crew members.

Roar - it's reputation precedes it.