A VISIT from a khaki-clad animal-trainer used to be a staple of late-night talk shows. The handler would bring a baby wallaby or an albino python or a chimp in nappies; one of the critters would invariably get loose; and the host would get nibbled or mounted. “Roar”, a delightful 1981 oddity currently receiving a re-release in America, is essentially an entire feature film composed of such havoc, courtesy of a menagerie of lions and other big cats run amok. It is perhaps one of the purest examples of folly in moviemaking. “Roar” has only a whisper of a plot: a wildlife expert at an African lodge awaits a visit from his wife and children, but they nearly miss each other. The real story lies in the backstory, which begins with Tippi Hedren, the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The Birds” and eventually a devoted animal conservationist. On a film shoot in Africa in 1969, she and Noel Marshall, her husband, spotted a derelict plantation house overrun by lions. Whereas the rest of us might have snapped a photo and run far away, the sight galvanised the couple to make a movie on behalf of Africa’s dwindling population of big cats.

Warned by experts of the lunacy of directing upwards of 30 lions, Ms Hedren and Mr Marshall resolved to train a four-legged cast themselves at their Beverly Hills home. Accumulating ever more lions, they founded an entire sanctuary, the Shambala Preserve, 40 miles from Los Angeles. There, over the course of five years, Ms Hedren and Mr Marshall, an executive producer flush from “The Exorcist”, shot “Roar”. They faced the obstacles that might be expected—70 bloody attacks that injured lead actors and crew (Mr Marshall needed treatment for gangrene), and scalped their cinematographer—as well as others that sound like messages from God: floods, wildfires and feline disease.

The resulting film is glorious chaos: a blend of cross-species slapstick, nature-loving hokeyness and the terrifying absurdity of actual actors courting a mauling. Mr Marshall plays the lead, Hank, delivering his lines at the volume of one accustomed to shouting over lions. Hank is ostensibly looking after a lodge and surrounding preserve, which is crawling with lions and an elephant or two. He breaks up fights among his charges, banters with a nervously joking assistant, and gets pawed at and tackled. “They’re just playing,” we’re assured.

The film’s jaw-dropping centrepiece occurs in Hank’s temporary absence, with the arrival of Hank’s wife and children, played by Ms Hedren and the couple’s real-life children, including Melanie Griffith (who needed facial reconstructive surgery after one attack). Lions swarm around the house while the family hide in lockers and cupboards; the scenes of prowling menace go on and on, as if the cameramen have retreated and left the cameras running. There’s summer-trip bickering: “Why did you bring us here? We’re just going to die” pouts “Mel”. But the dialogue is constantly interrupted by the nerve-wracking comedy of big cats knocking stuff over, wrestling or bounding to and fro, as if in some lost "Monty Python" sketch.

There’s no spectacle quite like it in fiction film, though in recent years “Animal Planet” has made free-ranging animals a more common sight on television, and a chimp-fostering documentary, “Project Nim”, induces similar head-shaking. What makes “Roar” difficult to dismiss as mere vanity project is the evident effort behind it: Jan de Bont, the scalped cinematographer, marshalled five separate cameras. The man who would go on to shoot “Die Hard” and direct “Speed” was a master at tracking complex action sequences, and the faux sun-kissed African plains look disarmingly lovely. (You’ll also see a lion on a skateboard.)

Despite sustaining a leg fracture, Ms Hedren looks remarkably composed, toughened perhaps by working on “The Birds”, and with Hitchcock. Ms Hedren and Mr Marshall, who died in 2010, ended up personally financing much of “Roar”, which cost $17m to make, but reputedly made only $2m worldwide. The distributors handling the re-release are marketing the film partly on its freak-show appeal.

“Roar” ends with a touchingly sincere appeal to save the lions. The message sadly remains relevant, but after seeing the over-friendly beasts run riot over their keepers, viewers might feel a bit more concerned for Ms Hedren, who was last reported to be still running the Shambala Preserve at 85 years of age.