1981, rated PG, 102 minutes
Pop quiz, hotshot: Your family’s trapped in a plywood shack surrounded by 100 lions. When the lions get hungry, they will invade the structure and eat any living thing they can get their teeth on. What do you do? What do you do?
Well, if you’re veteran Hollywood producer Noel Marshall (“The Exorcist”), who cast himself and his family as the protagonists in this very real scenario, you run around yelling a lot and waving your hands in the air. You also bleed. And you ignore any semblance of common sense and actually encourage the animals to repeatedly attack your wife, daughter, and two sons. For real. That’s “Roar,” the 11-years-in-the-making 1981 film re-released this spring.
There are a couple of ways you could approach this flick. First would be as a regular film, with a plot and characters and a shit-ton of aggravated toothmonsters. As narrative story about an estranged father seeking to reconcile with his family by flying them in to visit his African sanctuary for wild cats, and the terror that ensues as they fail in every attempt to defend themselves against the ferocious beasts, the film functions, well… poorly. It’s way less “Jaws” with claws than it is “Attack of the Killer Shrews” with tigers and jaguars and pumas. Though filmed by a crew of professionals, the wildly unpredictable nature of the furry costars gives an unmistakable air of improvisation, often reducing the actors themselves also to pure instinct — which in such situations means naturally to cower, run, hide, and shriek for help. Though an admirable effort seems to have been made to edit the mayhem caught on camera into a cohesive story, the result only barely ever rises above the level of a cheap home movie. The lions, in what has to be a Hollywood first-and-only, were given both writing and directing credits. Theirs may be the best work in the final cut.
Off camera, the production soldiered on in the face of floods, fires, and multiple maulings. Over 70 crew members were injured in the course of filming.
On the other hand, knowing that Marshall actually just delivered his own real-life family, including wife Tippi Hedren (“The Birds”), stepdaughter Melanie Griffith (who much later earned an Oscar nomination for “Working Girl”), and two of his sons, John and Jerry, literally, into the ravenous jaws of chance, plopping them like bait into a southern California compound where he’d been raising these feral creatures, and allowed the animals to do what they liked as the cameras rolled — specifically, to chase and claw and pounce and tear at them — the proceedings start to attain something closer to documentary. Which is nuts. This is not your average National Geographic episode. Between occasional smatterings of disjointed dialog, there are very genuine runs of undiluted human panic and despair. At one point, a 15-year-young Griffith, pinned face-down by a 600-pound lioness, lies quietly mewling, “No…no…get her off me…please…no…” as the predator serenely gnaws on her midsection before calmly clamping down on her head. This happened. This was real. Her stepdad, it is understood, sat nearby with a camera filming it as it happened. This incident led to over 100 stitches and Griffith’s first facial reconstructive surgery.
And that’s just one. Off camera, the production soldiered on in the face of floods, fires, and multiple maulings. Over 70 crew members were injured in the course of filming. Cinematographer Jan de Bont (who went on to direct more conventional thrillers like “Speed” and “Twister”) was scalped outright by one of the cats, requiring 220 stitches to sew his ruined melon back together. One of the main miracles of this movie might be that nobody was actually killed.
It could be imagined that watching “Roar” might be a lot like attending a matinee at the Roman Coliseum. In fact, even the music often bears a close comparison to the orchestral score of “Conan the Barbarian.” But, somewhere along the line, someone must have mentioned to Marshall that the film was skidding into pure, dire, horror movie territory. His apparent solution was to cut in occasional music tracks that sound like they were lifted from old “Loony Tunes” scenes. The effect is positively bewildering. Imagine watching the Three Stooges, only with genuine screaming, trauma, and bloodshed. It’s pure, perplexing insanity.
Teetering between exploitation, comedy, and snuff film as it does, this is obviously a movie that should never have been made. But it was, and at great visible physical and emotional expense to everyone involved. It’s difficult to divine exactly what Marshall was attempting to achieve. If he was hoping to emphasize the strength and majesty that inhabit the top of our planet’s natural food chain, he managed to do so in about the most unnatural of possible ways. Instead, he succeeds far better in underscoring the abject frailty of the human form. And, possibly, of the human mind. You should see it.
“Roar” screens at The Music Hall Loft, 131 Congress St., Portsmouth, June 13-14 and 16-17 at 7 p.m. Tickets are $10-$8. Call 603-436-2400 or visit themusichall.org.