The Primevals
USA | English
2023 | 100 Minutes
Director: David Allen
Cast: Juliet Mills, Leon Russom, Robert Cornthwaite
The story behind The Primevals is almost as interesting as the incredibly bizarre plot to the film itself. The origin of The Primevals lay in an older project titled Raiders of the Stone Ring that was developed in the late 1960s by stop-motion animator David Allen, Dennis Muren, and Jim Danforth. In the early 1970s, Allen returned to the project with the hopes of fleshing out the treatment. A script came in the mid-70s, as well as the new title for the film, the one it holds today.
In the early 80s, the film switched production companies twice, eventually landing at Full Moon Features (or Full Moon Entertainment as it was known at the time) and principal photography was done primarily in Romania in the summer of 1994 and was projected to last between ten and twelve weeks. Fast forward to 2023 and the Fantasia festival audience is the first to ever see the finished film more than five decades later.
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There is already a cult following for The Primevals before it has even been seen, based solely on the story of its creation alone, which in itself is rather amusing. I suppose when a film has been spoken about for decades, its bound to peek curiosities. There was even a full-page advertisement for the film placed in Vanity Fair magazine in 1980.
The world premiere of The Primevals represents the culmination of a longtime dream harbored by visual effects wizard David Allen, whose career stretched from 1970’s Equinox through Oscar-nominated work on Young Sherlock Holmes and beyond. Allen first conceived The Primevals as a vehicle for his stop-motion talents in the 1970s. He finally began directing the movie, which he scripted with fellow effects artist Randy Cook (The Gate), in the 1990s under producer Charles Band, for whom he’d brought all manner of beasties to life in Laserblast, Puppet Master and many others.
Sadly, the film’s completion was scuttled by Allen’s death from cancer in 1999 at just 54 years old. Now, at last, Band and longtime Allen associate Chris Endicott have seen the film to completion, and it emerges as a glorious tribute to the classic films of the legendary Ray Harryhausen, with a true sense of adventure and eye-popping, remarkably fluid dimensional animation.
Slight spoilers may possibly be found from this point on. Beware.
Stylistically, the film reminds of Jason And The Argonauts – or basically anything that the master of stop-motion cinema, Ray Harryhausen himself, was involved with. It’s an easy comparison to make, given the combination of massive monsters and Claymation (would this be considered kaiju is what I want to know!?) The creatures within The Primevals move fluidly and more believably than the jagged movements that make Harryhausen’s works so loveable.
Although the film primarily focuses on the finding of a dead yeti, and an expedition to find a living specimen, it soon evolves into a much bigger adventure that involves primitive man and two races of extraterrestrial lifeforms, a spaceship, and all sorts of fun mischief that comes from the meeting of all the above mentioned collectives. Worlds collide in a lost – or hidden portion of our own lovely little planet, and to say anything further on the subject risks spoiling the story.
The acting isn’t great and the dialogue is forced and not of the highest level of the art form but I doubt it would work as well any other way. At the end of the day, films like this find their charm in not being overly polished. This is a creature feature and that is where this film excels and works. For example, at one point Rondo Montana (which might also be one of the best character names ever penned, by the way) talks about how a clients wanted to make the archway of the gaming room in his house out of two giraffe necks, and after killing the first giraffe and watching it die, says “You ever look into the eyes of a dying giraffe? It changes a man”. Oh, shit, um, spoiler alert!
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I don’t think there was a single moment throughout the film’s running time where I didn’t have a gleeful smile plastered across my face. To discover a gem like this in 2023, one that for obvious reasons looks and feels like it was shot many years ago, is a gift in itself.
I don’t know what the future holds for the film – hopefully a theatrical run or at least a few stops at specialty cinemas and festivals like Fantasia, but what I do know is if you do get a chance to see this feature, don’t let it slip you by.
