This is one of the weirdest exploitation movies I've ever seen in my life.
Really. This was a fucking surreal experience. I don't know if there's a "proper" way to discuss a film like this--I don't even know if it's proper to call it an "exploitation" movie--but I will do my best. If you aren't familiar with the story of Roar, the succinct version is this: in 1970, Hitchcock actress Tippi Hedren and her then-husband Noel Marshall decided to make a movie dedicated to spreading awareness of the rapid shrinkage of the global big cat population. Over the next eleven years, Hedren and Marshall turned their California home into a private reserve for over a hundred untrained lions, tigers, and leopards (including Togare, the pet lion of Anton LaVey). Then, they decided to make a movie showing these animals doing their thing. And do their thing they did. 100+ cast and crew members, including Hedren and Marshall themselves, were badly injured as a result of maulings and other animal-related incidents. And yet, through Hell and high water, the team prevailed, and the movie hit European theaters in the early '80s to a disappointing return of $2 million against a $17 million budget.
And they kept in a shit-ton of footage of people being mauled.
What's weird is that I wasn't traumatized by this. Don't think of me as desensitized by all the violence I ordinarily observe as part of writing for this site--I can still spot the difference between fake violence and real, and the violence inflicted on human beings in the course of Roar is very real. But the movie is so fucking weird that the sheer grotesquery of the violence never quite caught up with me. This is a movie about contrasts: obvious purpose duking it out against an obvious subversion of that same purpose. It is happy-go-lucky and brutally visceral at the same time. Even as you get caught up in scenes of people enjoying themselves, you are constantly wearing down your fingernails with worry over whether the next inevitable injury will top the one that came before. And then it will break both of those moods to throw something in that's just bizarre. This is a one of a kind movie and even if it's not the most enjoyable movie in the world, for reasons obvious and otherwise, it's still worth a look if you feel your guts can take it.
Yes, the movie has a plot...sort of. In essence, Hank is a Bob Ross lookalike who runs a small African estate along with the film's plethora of wild animals. His friend Mativo is understandably terrified by the situation, but Hank tells him not to worry--this house will make excellent lodging for Hank and his family, when his wife Madeleine, daughter Melanie, and sons Jerry and John all finally arrive as he's requested. Yep, that's right...the man is taking a leaf from the book of Heihachi and literally throwing his family to the lions. (Noel Marshall plays Hank, Hedren plays Madeleine, and their respective kids play their roles eponymously, adding a notable meta-layer to all this.) He doesn't do so out of malice, however, and he does his damnedest to prove to Mativo that the lions are friendly. They just need a little social balance, as Togare, the renegade, frequently steals food from the central "pride" and pisses them off. I say "pride" in quotes as much of these early sequences show the various lions fighting each other. Constantly. (There's a "No Animal Were Harmed" Certificate at the front of the movie and it seems to be genuine--some scenes of animals covered in "blood" actually just show them painted, and none of the scraps between the animals seem to have left permanent injury. Still, one may find their focus on these prolonged intra-animal fights listing after a while.)
We learn quickly that Madeleine and Co. have no idea what lies in store for them. Hank evidently assumes that they'll arrive later than they actually do, as he travels away from the plantation to convince the local government that a mauling incident occurring on his plantation should not halt the proposed ending of lion-hunts in the area. As Hank's family spends several days among the cats, watching them tear the house apart piece by piece, we follow the story of his attempts to make it back to the house as the men who were injured at Hank's place follow him through the brush, sniping down every big cat they see. But in the end, everything's alright, because despite biting, tackling, and clawing them, the lions did not kill Hank's family in their sleep, which means they're friendly. I'm not kidding, that's the rationale they give for why Hank is right about humans and lions being able to live in peace. The lions abstained from eating his wife and children in their sleep.
They were real damn lucky. Like I said, this movie is edge-of-your-seat horror from start to finish. Anyone who has even had a dog knock them down would understand there is something in our brains dating back to when we lived in caves that tells us how rational it is to be afraid of four-legged predators with fangs, claws, and superior strength. I've never been attacked by a lion, but you can really understand the fear the cast is feeling from the visuals--never mind that most of the actors spend most of the movie screaming in some capacity. It is impossible for me to describe this centermost aspect of the film without suggesting that it is a horror movie about an eccentric driven mad by isolation on the African savanna who subjects his family to some Jaws-esque killer creature shenanigans as part of his weird social experiments. But instead, this is scripted as a family feature about a bunch of chumps who learn that their conceptions of the violent, scalp-severing animals they fear are misplaced. Hell, the ending song even says that the plantation is their Garden of Eden! To get a handle on the tone of this film, just imagine that every single time someone is graphically injured, someone who looks uncannily like Bob Ross is in the background, grinning and saying, "Oh, no, no! It's fine! Everything's fine!" Even as he is the one being subjected to tiger-mauling. Similarly, Hank's family's response to see three dozen lions trap them in a house? "Holy mackerel! Look what the cat dragged in!"
But then, this isn't even really a proper family film...one of the few conversations that manages to stay on-script is Melanie complaining to her mother and siblings that this trip will leave her sex-starved. She then goes on to blame her mother for Hank's leaving due to passing that same sexual starvation onto him! This is one of the few scenes in the movie where the cast's attempts at acting aren't horribly marred by their attempts to act around their feline co-stars. This means that every single interaction between human beings has something fundamentally wrong in it--either a performance botched out of fear, or a bizarro line that somehow managed to survive all eleven years of production. To put it simply, this movie is a tonal mess, and therefore it can only be appreciated for sheer spectacle.
What's weird is that the filmmakers, in their undying earnestness and sincerity, actually somewhat succeed in their mission. Taken as a collection of shots of lions unfettered by human influence, the movie shows these creatures as they really are, in ways both good and bad. I will confess to having a certain bias towards big cats because when they do take to humans, they act essentially identical to their housecat cousins. Lions are actually really cute, and for all the violence of the film, there are still plenty of moments where you can see this fact. I understood the general message of the movie to be that we should leave these animals alone, reorganizing our own habits to better accommodate their shared position on this planet...even if the main characters take it a step beyond that by choosing to live with the lions directly. Objectively, the movie fails to prove its thesis, but you can still bits of convincing evidence here and there. The film never convinces you of its opposite point, that these animals should be exterminated--it highlights the cruelty of that act even while refusing to sugarcoat what the cats can do to a human body. I think that's pretty admirable.
Still, though. Noel Marshall and Tippi Hedren are aliens, and no one can convince me otherwise. Watch this strange, alien movie, if you can stand the sight of real blood, and know that there is literally no way an experiment like this could be replicated again.
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