Roar (1981) - 2/10

I’m watching this thanks to Josh & Chuck at Stuff You Should Know, who did an episode on this, “The most dangerous film ever made”. Hank (Noel Marshall) lives on a ranch in East Africa, with Madeline (Tippi Hedren). Hedren and Marshall are also producing and directing and were married at the time. This is very much a personal project, they financed it too… and it wasn’t cheap. To round out the main cast, Madeline brings their daughter, Melanie (Hedren’s real life daughter, Melanie Griffiths) to stay and help them with the wild animals. That’s the hook here, the animals really are wild, not trained which is why is so dangerous and safety on set appears to go out the window. Is this arguably even a set? As we’re introduced to a load of big cats, one cast member declares Hank “Crazy!”. He’s not wrong. If you see someone getting hurt on screen, they’re really getting hurt. Hank’s idea is protect the cats from people, from poachers and those trying to coral them and take their land. Noble, but this direction is clearly farcical. It’s not funny though. Knowing that the scenes of lions, tigers, cheetahs and jaguars mauling the cast is real, is genuinely pretty scary. There’s quite a lot of blood and little of it is fake. It’s a wonder no one was killed. The acting, dialogue, plot, is all terrible. It’s full of mixed messages and there’s a jarring sentimental score that’s almost Disney-like, it’s ridiculous. The animals are beautiful though, magnificent really. The ranch is pretty amazing too and really, any direction you point the camera, it looks epic. It gets quite gritty and gnarly (literally) in places and there’s some genuinely fantastic camera work, but its biggest issue is all the cast are annoying and quite frankly deserve to be eaten. There are some lighter moments, cubs playing with skateboards, a tiger getting annoyed with a shoe, an elephant stealing a boat, but mostly it’s a tale of human stupidity. The whole thing is a ridiculous messy folly,. If you’ve not listened to the Stuff You Should Know episode about it, I recommend it… but not the film. Its only redeeming feature is its call for animal rights in Africa. I’m really not sure this was the best way to do it though.

2/10