Roar (1981) Review

Roar (1981) Review

 

I’ve seen a lot of movies, but I have never seen anything like Roar. It’s the kind of movie you have to see to believe, having earned a reputation as “the most dangerous film ever made” and for good reason, because in terms of realistic animal encounters captured for a motion picture, Roar comes in first place by a landslide.

Here’s the story behind the movie: Noel Marshall, husband of actress Tippi Hedren (star of Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds) loved big cats, and wanted to make a movie about them. So, they accumulated a bunch of lions, tigers, cougars, panthers, and other animals, and Noel Marshall produced, wrote, directed, and starred in what some would later call “the most expensive home movie ever made” with Hedren, step daughter Melanie Griffith, and his three sons also starring. Production was plagued with problems, and the film wasn’t completed until years after production began, but the biggest problem on set was—can you guess? Maybe something to do with actors and over a hundred of the largest mammalian predators on planet earth being in the same space? Yeah, it was a bit of a problem.

Look, I love animals, but like the Kratt’s brothers used to say in their kids shows Kratt’s Creatures and Zaboomafoo, you should never approach a wild animal because they can be unpredictable. In Roar, there are literally dozens of big cats sharing the screen with the actors for nearly the entire runtime, and the looks of terror on their faces are genuine. These were untrained wild animals, and it’s no surprise so many people were injured on the set, but I can’t believe no one was actually killed. It’s the kind of thing that would never, ever be allowed to happen today.

The actual plot is paper-thin. Noel Marshall basically plays himself, an animal “expert” who is awaiting his family at his remote homestead, which is infested with the big cats. The cats come in and out of the house as they please, they “play” with him, tackle him, and one big male lion in particular is always scrapping with the tigers and other lions. His family arrives while he’s out of the house, and they have to hide from the cats wherever they can. It’s terrifying to watch because of how realistic it all is. I think there was actually very little acting going on. In addition to so many hair-raising scenes with the big cats, there’s also a stand-out scene where an African elephant attacks the group in a little boat and completely destroys the boat, then picks up Tippi Hedren and puts her on top of its head before dropping her back in the lake. This moment actually resulted in Hedren fracturing her ankle and contracting gangrene. No wonder Hedren and Marshall divorced after making this!

Roar isn’t even fully a horror film; it’s classed as an adventure comedy, though I don’t know if that classification is much more accurate. There’s a point where Noel Marshall wants his buddy to get in a jeep with two full-grown Siberian Tigers inside, and his buddy says: “This is madness.” Yeah, that about sums it up. There are some strong Grizzly Man vibes to this movie. Seeing Noel Marshall telling other people how it’s safe and not to worry while a lion casually chews on his bare hand is rather unsettling. Marshall isn’t much of an actor, and he makes for a pretty annoying main character, always speaking in a high, whiny voice and constantly being interrupted by his pride of felines.

This is definitely not your typical Hollywood film. Its structure is rather crude, with an improvisational style throughout. It doesn’t come as a surprise, though, as I’m sure it was difficult to know what the lions would do and when they would do it. Apparently the cinematographer spent a lot of hours filming them and just waiting for them to do something interesting. One aspect of the movie I genuinely enjoyed was all the footage of the animals, because even though the premise is completely disreputable, the creatures are still beautiful and given tons of screen time. There are a number of other negatives, though. The pacing isn’t great, the characters aren’t interesting, and the tone is inconsistent. The music is mostly upbeat tribal drums, which sounds bizarre, but also adds to the absurdity of the whole thing.

You’d think the main antagonistic force would be the lions and tigers—and in the extensive sequence where the family is hiding from them, they are—but there’s actually a villain character who is a hunter and isn’t happy with all these wild animals being kept in semi-captivity all together. Honestly, I side with the villain here. This menagerie of wild animals shouldn’t be all grouped together, they should be in their natural environments, without humans interacting with them. The villain is eventually killed by lions, and in the end, there’s this weird attempt at the characters coming to the revelation that the big cats actually aren’t that dangerous. It just doesn’t work at all, because the entire time everyone has been so scared of them (and rightfully so!), and the message of the film is supposed to be that humans and big cats can live in harmony together, I guess, but with the knowledge that so many people were hurt in the making of said film, it outright fails.

In the realm of animal attack films, Roar has no equal. It’s exhausting to watch, but also a must-see movie. It will make you raise your legs up off the floor and tuck them toward your body, cover your gaping mouth with both hands, make you shout “Oh no!” and keep your attention for the entire runtime (for the most part), but keep in mind that it’s not really a horror movie, just a horrifically misguided concept for a movie.