ZONE FILM CHALLENGE: BLEED FOR THIS

Spoilers for Roar (1981, dir. Noel Marshall) and Police Story (1985, dir. Jackie Chan)

John Wright: Welcome back to the second edition of the Zone Film Challenge. This week’s prompt was Bleed For This; “Pick a Movie with a notable injury to a cast or crew member.” It’s fair to say that we liked both of the movies that we picked -

Alex McDonough: Well, there’s a push and pull with Roar. With Police Story, that’s a much better film from an objective measure. This week we’ve highlighted two films that are in separate directions — one’s injuries are purely on director and producer irresponsibility and the other is almost entirely owned by its own star and director. I think they contrast well.

A quick clarification on this topic. We decided on this weeks before the incident on the set of Rust that led to the accidental death of the cinematographer, Halyna Hutchins, with one of the prop guns on set.

JW: It is by no means a happy coincidence that injuries on film sets are in the news, we send our most sincere condolences to the family Halyna Hutchins.

Now, you picked Roar, a movie notable for having a lot of injuries, if you’d like to more specifically talk about its reputation.

AM: So, Roar is a notorious When Animals Attack movie. It was in production for about eleven years -

JW: Always a good sign.

AM: It’s right on the edge of being a ‘70s animal attack film, but it came out in 1981. It really is one of those movies where you have to see it to believe it, it is that wildly narcissistic. It was made by Noel Marshall, who was a producer on The Exorcist, and his wife Tippi Hedren who was an actress famous for The Birds, another movie involving animals attacking Hedren on set.

JW: Birds are, I will say, far less hazardous to the average human than lions.

AM: Roar is a movie about a naturalist who is trying to raise lions, tigers, panthers, and all sorts of other big cats in a home in Africa for some type of science…thing? It’s unclear. He’s neglected his family but regardless, his family comes to visit. On his way to pick them up, he gets distracted because he’s off fighting poachers so his family shows up at home and gets terrorized by the lions who have been whipped into a frenzy by a rogue lion named Togar who sometimes wanders into the compound.

Now, this movie has a reputation because it had over 200 on-set injuries towards the humans. It states that no lions or other animals were injured during the making of the film which isn’t entirely true, but this film — which the two biggest names in the film are Tippi Hedren and her daughter Melanie Griffith — it destroyed everyone’s life who was associated with it aside from maybe the aforementioned pair. This is definitely one of the weirdest films any actor can have in their filmography. Tippi Hedren and Noel Marshall were married, both Big Cat lovers, and they made this film to advocate against the poaching and exploitation of Big Cats and to make a statement against it.

JW: “We highlighted the exploitation of big cats by exploiting some big cats.”

AM: Exactly. There are probably one hundred big cats in this film. And the thing about cats is that they’re hard to train, like house cats are, and it only gets harder the bigger the cat gets. It’s hard enough to train just one big cat, you really cannot train one hundred.

JW: At the very least, you cannot have one hundred acting like they’re trained at the same time.

AM: Additionally, this movie has a reputation for being rambling and having raw scenes of cats attacking the actors and cornering them while a plot is loosely strung along. Those were mostly my expectations going in, that it was a LiveLeak video released in theaters in 1981 that shows big cats terrorizing people and that’s…that’s what I got.

For the prompts, I usually try to pick a movie I haven’t seen before but for this I had to go big or stay home and this was the biggest. There’s a lot happening in this that is truly bizarre, even past the injuries, there’s the bizarre set decoration. For some reason, the bathroom has a watercolor portrait of JFK. They’re supposed to be in Africa, so like, he brought the framed portrait with him? And put it in the bathroom?

I suppose this means that Noel Marshall’s character is canonically a JFK guy so he’s a Chicago Democrat I guess.

JW: All four of his dead uncles voted for JFK.

“It’s a film made entirely of bad omens!”

AM: Another thing, going off that, is Noel Marshall couldn’t find people to act in the film so he just drafted his brothers to act in it.

JW: Again, always a good sign.

AM: So, there’s an actor who plays what is supposed to be his son who looks exactly like Noel Marshall because it’s just his brother. It’s wild.

JW: Okay, talking about expectations, was there any moment that stuck out as a subversion of expectations?

AM: As a subversion? No. The movie affirmed my expectations. I expected a lot of Big Cats on screen and I have to hammer the point home, you will never be able to anticipate the number of cats they stuff on screen. There are so many Big Cats.

JW: The fur is just flying.

AM: It is beyond your wildest expectations.

JW: Now, conservation has always been an ideological undercurrent in America particularly as the environmental movement began to take off in the 1970s but I’m not sure when PETA and stricter exotic animal laws began to take off. It was definitely after this because you could never do something like this now.

AM: Yeah, this was — they owned all the lions and the intention was for Hedren and Marshall to open a lion preserve to rehome the lions after the film was finished.

JW: But the film took eleven years.

AM: Yeah, and there are a worrying number of lions to consider. However many lions you think can fit in one frame, double that number because there are scenes where lions start pouring out of the doorway and okay, they got two or three lions through, that’s gotta be it — and then four, five, six, seven, eight lions. It’s terrifying!

JW: The lions are doing a Three Stooges bit.

AM: It’s legitimately terrifying. You can see the actors sweat with genuine fear. I’ve never seen actors this scared, it pushes the limits of what you can do in a movie. It’s one of the most experimental films in American film history.

JW: Let’s go right to the top then, what is the wildest, craziest stunt or moment?

AM: There’s a scene where Noel and his friend are taking a boat down river and two tigers follow them, jump on the boat and the weight of the tigers sinks the boat. Now, tigers are not like other cats, they’re not scared of water, tigers are expert swimmers. Tigers, they’re scary, they’ll kill fishermen. They’ll swim up to isolated fishermen and pull one out of the fishing boat, drown and kill him, drag him back to shore, eat him, and go back for the second.

So you see these two tigers sinking this boat and I don’t care how well you have these tigers trained, that is definitely activating some sort of killer instinct in them. That scene is chilling because you’re convinced that these tigers are going to murder them because they are gonna be way better in the water than any human being is going to be. I don’t care if it’s Michael Phelps or Ryan Lochte, the tigers are winning.

JW: And they weren’t Phelps.

AM: No, the tigers were going up against Chuck Swirsky.

“You can see the actors sweat with genuine fear. I’ve never seen actors this scared, it pushes the limits of what you can do in a movie.”

JW: Were there any visible injuries? Was there a Carrie Fisher coke nail moment where you can see the stitches?

AM: It’s hard to tell because it happens so often but certainly. There’s a moment where Noel Marshall is breaking up two fighting lions, one turns and it’s clearly actually pissed off, it’s not acting, and it paws him in the face with its huge paw. I guess its claws weren’t out or else he wouldn’t have a face but it visibly knocks him down. When he gets up, he’s bleeding a little bit, you can tell he got hurt. It’s hard to tell what’s improvised, what was and what wasn’t, like, was it written into the script that lions were fighting or did it just happened on set and they decided to capture it?

JW: Just as an aside, what is the runtime on this?

AM: 98 minutes, roughly.

JW: Okay, I’m really milking this bit but when a movie has a reputation as being rambling, took eleven years to make, and comes out at under 100 minutes, these are all very good signs.

AM: Yes.

JW: It’s a film made entirely of bad omens!

AM: It’s the most cursed film related to The Exorcist and that includes The Exorcist. And that’s just one mauling. You see the lions jump on other actors and you can watch the actors make their peace with death. They curl into a ball, they are so scared. I gotta reiterate, you’ve got to see it to believe it. No amount of explanation can prepare you for what Noel Marshall unleashed on his actors and himself.

JW: Many of whom were his family!

AM: Yeah, half of the actors were his family. Tippi Hedren was his wife, his brothers play two different characters, and then Melanie Griffith was his stepdaughter.

JW: Let’s talk about the ramifications, the inevitable outcomes of all of this.

AM: There’s a lot. Real quick, some notable injuries. The cinematographer, Jan de Bont who went on to do Speed, was scalped by a lion and received over 200 stitches. Hedren got bit by a lion and was attacked by an elephant who nearly broke her back. Melanie Griffith had to get facial reconstruction surgery. The AD was bitten in the throat and jaw and nearly died. Multiple lions were killed by law enforcement because they broke loose from the set. This includes the main lion, Robby, who was the heroic lion.

JW: And the director, Noel Marshall, was mauled multiple times, correct?

AM: Oh yeah, he got mauled a ton.

JW: So don’t worry, the guy who incited all of this also got mauled repeatedly.

AM: Immediately after this film ended, Hedren filed for divorce. She cited extreme physical abuse because “my husband kept making me interact with these lions” — and Hedren is also a big cat lady — that’s a type of person, clearly, because they keep reoccurring.

JW: Absolutely a type of person.

AM: In the divorce, she not only successfully got a divorce from Noel Marshall, she also got all of the lions that they owned and opened the Big Cat preserve.

JW: Good! It’s kind of a happy ending, I guess.

AM: It’s kind of a happy ending but the movie makes it so clear that it’s Noel Marshall, specifically, who is so obsessed with lions that he will neglect his family to spend the rest of his life with them. And he got to do it for eleven years.

JW: So, it’s one of those things where the passion project ends up revealing things about the creator that they did not intend to reveal?

AM: Yes! You get the best portrait of Noel Marshall through Roar. It is genuine auteur filmmaking. You can debate auteur theory as much as you want, but if you don’t believe in it, make an exception for this. It is truly only doable by one man, only one man would do it like this and it was Noel Marshall. He passed away in 2010, never made another movie, he was out of the industry after Roar came out. It feels like he was directing the film for so long because he knew that once it was over, it was over.

JW: He was over. Lastly, fifteen words or less, give me a summary.

AM: Man neglects family to live with cats who hate him.

I recommend it, I think it’s one of a kind. It’s pretty easy to find through the y’know, Usual Suspects. It’s not a good film but it is certainly novel.

“It’s the most cursed film related to The Exorcist and that includes The Exorcist.”

JW: We keep coming back to the phrase “It must be seen to be believed.”

AM: It is fascinating.

JW: Well, I’ve never seen Roar so I’m going to have to now.

AM: Now, you selected Police Story

JW: Yeah, Police Story, 1985, starring and directed by Jackie Chan

AM: Police Story has quite the reputation, would you care to expand on that?

JW: It is Jackie Chan’s personal favorite film of his. Its reputation is tied to a lot of marquee movie-selling stunts. I would say that the majority of the film’s reputation is just “you will not believe the stuff that Jackie does in this movie.” Moreover, I think it has a reputation as something akin to like, being the most well known picture from the most well-known guy of the 80s action renaissance in Hong Kong.

AM: This film, Police Story 2, Armour of God; all those films ushered in the pre-Hard Boiled style of Hong Kong Action filmmaking and really changed stunt work.

JW: Definitely, and I’ll get into this later but it is, just as an aside, it is worth pointing out that they hadn’t really done kung-fu movies as police movies up until this point, and Police Story was a trailblazer in that regard. I have also watched this movie three times now so my expectations were that I would have a good time. I’m not sure whether to chalk this up to the unique genius of Jackie Chan as a performer, or to chalk it up to just cultural differences, genre is less rigid in some parts of the world, whether Hong Kong is one of those places I don’t feel qualified to say but Police Story is basically a comedy. It’s like 65% comedy 35% action

AM: Yeah, it’s mostly a comedy.

JW: Yeah and that’s the crazy thing, Jackie’s basically just playing Will Smith’s character from Bad Boys here. He’s like a serious cop man who doesn’t play by the rules.

We mentioned Hard Boiled earlier, he’s more or less playing Chow Yun Fat’s Inspector Tequila from that film. His superiors don’t like him but he gets results. Difference is, Jackie’s constantly pratfalling. He can’t stop doing slapstick, even when he’s a serious cop man, which I love. It’s very self-effacing. It’s a very “movie” movie if that makes sense.

AM: What’s your wildest moment in the film?

JW: It’s tough to say. I’m tempted to say the conclusion; the last 20 to 30 minutes of that movie is a barrage of stunts you’ll never have seen before.

AM: The scene in the mall, yeah.

JW: But man, I don’t know, it’s hard to pick just one. There’s the woman jumping off the roof into the pool. There’s the opening stunt with the bus where Jackie’s just hanging off it with an umbrella. I dunno if it was shot in an office park somewhere but they were really driving that bus around and Jackie was actually hanging from it by an umbrella.

AM: The opening sequence with the bus always blows me away.

JW: Even driving that, it was like a little Honda or something, some crappy little hatchback through that shantytown at the beginning. All the way from the top of the hill to the bottom of the hill and they’re setting off those big gasoline explosions all the way!

“That’s the thing with Jackie. That’s what makes the comedy so incongruous. You’re just watching a guy mutilate himself for 100 minutes.”

AM: They just destroy this little town that’s on the outskirts of Hong Kong.

JW: That, to me, I think is the craziest thing.

AM: That would be my pick. If I picked one stunt, that’s the one.

JW: The craziest thing is how many stunts they set up that they clearly had one take to get right and they got them all right.

AM: What was the most severe injury that Chan or anyone else experienced on the film?

JW: I looked this one up. For Jackie, the one that everybody always goes back to is the film’s final stunt. The ending confrontation takes place in a multi-story shopping mall. It’s just 25 minutes of absolute insanity and it climaxes with a briefcase containing evidence falling all the way from the third floor to the first. Everybody’s racing downstairs to get it, so Jackie jumps onto a pole with Christmas lights on it, and slides down like, three stories and hits a kiosk or something to break his fall. From that, he got second degree burns on his hands, a dislocated pelvis, and his 7th and 8th vertebrae were injured doing that stunt.

AM: Oh my God.

JW: It could have been much worse! He went and shot scenes for a different movie that same day.

AM: Wow.

JW: The thing that made it so bad though were the lights themselves. The idea was that they’d plug them into a car battery so that it’d be low voltage and not burn Jackie’s hands but someone screwed up and they were still plugged into the wall when they did the stunt so he got the full grid on the way down.

AM: Jeez.

JW: That’s the thing with Jackie. That’s what makes the comedy so incongruous. You’re just watching a guy mutilate himself for 100 minutes.

AM: We alluded to this earlier. These films exist on opposite ends of the scale.

JW: On the Auteur Spectrum, right, you have: career destroying vs arguably his best film.

AM: Yeah, Chan, he’s taking on the bulk of the risk. “I’m writing these stunts for me, I’m performing them, if something goes wrong I am the one to blame.” Where with Roar, Noel Marshall is placing his faith in the cats to not murder him his actors and his crew.

JW: His actual family!

AM: He’s making the crew and everyone live with the cats! There’s a totally different sense of risk with Police Story versus Roar where the injuries suffered on both sets are real but Roar’s are just so much more irresponsible.

JW: I’m not sure if this is true. I read this in the IMDb trivia section so take it with a grain of salt. I should have said this when we were discussing the movie’s reputation; Police Story has a ton of guys go through glass and apparently the sugar glass they were using was double thickness compared to the industry norm so it led to a higher rate of injuries for stunt guys. But you didn’t hear about anybody dying, or being scalped.

AM: Or having to get facial reconstruction surgery

JW: Another thing from that IMDb trivia section; apparently the cast and crew started to refer to the movie as “Glass Story” because it involved so much glass.

AM: What is the legacy of Police Story in the broader scheme of action films, even in regards to on-set injuries? Because Jackie Chan is infamous for doing his own stunts and getting injured doing them.

JW: There is the obvious influential stuff. There is a lot of the DNA of this movie in particular in American buddy cop cinema that you’d see later. Most notably the Bad Boys movies, Bad Boys II has a pretty similar scene to the shantytown bit that opens Police Story.

“On the Auteur Spectrum, right, you have: career destroying vs arguably his best film.”

AM: Yeah, yeah it does.

JW: There was a real problem, just because Jackie was such a unique force within Hong Kong cinema, with people immediately copying whatever movies he did. Like when they did Legend of Drunken Master, everyone started doing movies with drunken boxing. Part of the marketing strategy for this movie was to just call it Police Story so no one knew how to rip them off, but it did at least partially lead to the trend of police movies as kung fu movies so it did lead more directly to stuff like Hard Boiled.

AM: I think it’s interesting how Police Story set a template for about the next decade forward of action filmmaking in Hong Kong. You mentioned Bad Boys II, it definitely immediately resonated overseas. Jackie Chan was brought over; it was a cross-cultural hit. He was in the Rush Hour films, had a TV show, no breakfast cereal, but I’m sure that was in the talks. I think Police Story was the genesis for what we identify now as the modern understanding of Jackie Chan in the west.

JW: Definitely ,and just the individual stunts; you do see people iterating on those concepts in later movies. I’m just reading from the Wikipedia page here. The bit at the beginning where Jackie stops the bus inspired a similar bit in Tango and Cash with Stallone and Kurt Russell. In the aforementioned completely insane mall fight, there’s a bit where Jackie drives a motorcycle through several panes of glass while a guy is hanging off the front of it, apparently Brandon Lee did something similar to that in his film Rapid Fire. Also, and this is perhaps the coolest bit from this Wikipedia page, apparently the Hong Kong TV equivalent of Cops just had the Police Story theme as their theme song for a while.

AM: That sounds on brand.

JW: Why improve on perfection?

AM: Do you recommend the film?

JW: Absolutely, to anybody. It’s all time action set pieces, really funny comedy.

AM: It’s a real crowd pleaser, definitely a film I’d throw on for any audience.

JW: Hundred minute runtime, as funny as it is inventive as it is-

AM: Shocking.

JW: Shocking’s a good word for it. You really can’t go wrong. It’s not even gratuitous in terms of violence. I don’t think there’s even any blood in it.

AM: The only thing I think modern audiences would take issue with is how much Jackie Chan does not like women.

JW: He does not like women or lawyers.

AM: It is a real boys’ club movie but it’s definitely got significant appeal past Jackie Chan’s old man outlook on things

JW: Yeah everyone needs to find out eventually that Jackie Chan is one of those guys with a “Controversies” section on Wikipedia.

AM: Yes he is.

JW: Just go in expecting an ‘80s cop movie with ‘80s cop movie politics.

AM: Brief summary, 15 words or less, gimme a summary of Police Story.

JW: Jackie loves glass, hates lawyers and crime. A barrage of ‘80s sweaters.

Wanna take the challenge yourself? Next week’s prompt is: ’Tis The Season’. Watch a personal favorite holiday film. We made it easy for you because uh, well, we decided to do it last minute.