Roar
This is the second time I have seen this movie, I may have posted about it here before, and it is still not something I can watch or analyze rationally. If that sounds strange, I'll tell you a little about the production and you'll get the idea.
Roar was made by delusional hollywood liberals. It may, in fact, be the ultimate delusional liberal movie. So delusional that the director, a wealthy executive producer whose latest success was The Exorcist of all films, believed mankind could live in harmony with lions and sought to prove this by filming a family-friendly comedy using SEVENTY ONE UNTRAINED LIONS, MANY OF THEM MALE, and HIS OWN FAMILY AS ACTORS. This went about as well as you'd expect: production lasted over eleven years, over a hundred people were injured (many of them on-screen), the lions were on edge from having too many males in one place and being surrounded by other untrained big cats, the film bombed, and Tippi Hedren divorced the director afterwards.
Watching Roar is like watching them haul the steamship uphill in Fitzcarraldo, except that scene is the entire movie and the cast is constantly taking real injuries. Even though you know it doesn't happen, there's still a real, overpowering sense that the ropes could snap at any moment, that the lion biting Tippi Hedren's head (which scratched her skull and sent her to the hospital for several weeks) could bite just a little harder and kill her.
Roar awakens a sort of primal terror and hyper-alertness in me. My filmfag brain shuts off and I watch the lions like a hawk, waiting for the slightest cue they'll attack or try something playful. They frequently break out in fights, drag in dead animals, or chew on the cast. The cast (except for the director) is in constant terror of them. Reportedly they often screamed in pain the moment a take ended. You see them injured seriously on screen, repeatedly, in scenes played off as heart-warming or funny. This is the scariest movie I have ever seen, the director and his character is an weirdly vindictive madman who steals, cheats, and literally throws his own family to the lions for his mad utopian dream, and it's trying to play itself off as a family comedy.
Would I recommend this? Maybe. It's an experience, something you dig up on Youtube and share with friends who think you're exaggerating. It may be the best accidental horror film ever made and the cinematographer manages some nuts shots considering he's surrounded by lions and gets scalped by one.