‘Oh, that’s Johnny Lion. You never have to worry about John...’
As I sat watching a pride of lions parading around on screen in Noel Marshall’s ‘adventure comedy’ Roar (I’d argue the film is neither an adventure nor comedic but not to worry), I found myself questioning how the hell I would go about writing a review for this film. I have often seen certain films described as ‘unlike anything else’ and while many films are unique and innovative in their own way, they are almost always derivative of something else. Roar, however, is genuinely unlike any other film I’ve ever seen. This is a genuine madcap endeavour that absolutely shouldn’t exist, and yet…
Rather than relaying the plot as I normally would do at this point in the review, it would be remiss of me not to provide a cursory description of the film’s insane conceit and absolutely wild production history. One day, famous actress Tippi Hedren and her husband Noel Marshall were driving through a national park in Mozambique when they happened across an abandoned plantation house that had inadvertently become a home for a pride of wild lions. When considering what a beautiful sight this impromptu lion colony was, Marshall and Hedren noted how cinematic the creatures were. At this point, most normal people would smile at the thought of a film made up of real lions chasing around real actors and then drive on by never to think of lions ever again. Not Marshall and Hedren. No, Marshall and Hedren instead embarked on a gruelling 11-year production involving 150 actual lions and many other wild animals inevitably resulting in over 70 trips to the emergency room for both cast and crew alike. Hedren was bitten on the head by one of the lions (!), Marshall almost lost an arm (!!) and cinematographer Jan de Bont was scalped (!!!). The truly terrifying thing about this ordeal is that the finished film that caused all this anguish is… pretty crappy. The plot is non-existent, the acting (Hedren aside) is amateur, and I couldn’t tell you the plot of the film if I myself was threatened with a pride of lions. But the animals… by lord, the animals are majestic.
Marshall shot hours and hours of footage and the result is a truly once-in-a-lifetime document of what happens when you set a bunch of wild animals free amongst a family of lunatics. It’s particularly odd that Hedren was so keen to get this project off the ground (she mortgaged four houses to do so) considering how traumatic her previous experience working with animals had been on Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds (is a bird an animal? I’m going to say it is).
While Roar is not a good film in the traditional sense, it is a truly fascinating watch that I would recommend to everyone – a genuinely unique film.
