THE PRIMEVALS (2023)

Studio:   Full Moon Features
Director: David Allen
Writer:   David Allen, Randy Cook
Producer: Charles Band
Stars:    Richard Joseph Paul, Juliet Mills, Leon Russom, Walker Brandt, Tai Thai

Review Score:

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Summary:

The discovery of a mutated yeti leads an academic research team on an expedition that uncovers an ancient alien civilization.

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Synopsis:     Show/Hide Spoilers

Nepalese shepherd Tenzang returns to a Sherpa hut deep in the Himalayas to tell his brother Siku, their Lama, and Kathleen, a social anthropology researcher doing field work, that a group of shepherds captured a yeti, which their culture reveres as "an ancient one." Siku and Kathleen follow after Tenzang when he goes back to the creature. In a rage, the yeti kills Tenzang in front of his horrified brother before another shepherd fires a gunshot, triggering an avalanche that kills the creature.

Four weeks later, Matt Connor, a former PhD candidate whose dissertation on the yeti was previously discredited, attends a university presentation where Dr. Claire Collier of the Department of Anthropology publicly unveils the yeti's carcass. Afterward, Matt confronts Claire for her role in rejecting his paper. Assuring him that his time has finally come, Claire invites Matt to meet with molecular biologist Dr. Lloyd Trent.

Lloyd reveals that the recovered yeti's physiology is so unusual, he believes it may have undergone a controlled mutation. To prove his theory, Lloyd shows Matt a surgical scar on the creature's dissected brain, indicating someone manipulated the yeti's emotional center for unknown reasons.

Agreeing with Matt that they need a living specimen in order to investigate further, Claire arranges an unofficial expedition that she plans to conclude with her and Matt co-authoring a book on their discoveries. Claire explains Kathleen will help them once they are in Nepal since she is a former student and also the person who smuggled the dead yeti out of the country.

Claire and Matt first travel to Calcutta to meet Rondo Montana, a big game hunter who can fly them discreetly on his private plane. After rescuing them from a trio of street thieves, Rondo reveals he's been out of the safari business for 12 years. Lured by the prospect of finding a yeti, however, Rondo agrees to join the expedition.

When Claire, Matt, and Rondo arrive at the remote Sherpa hut, Kathleen informs them the Lama died two days earlier. Although distraught that he is now the sole survivor in his family, Siku agrees to be the group's guide through the mountains.

Claire, Matt, Rondo, Kathleen, and Siku set out on a trail through The Forbidden Pass. While camped on the first night, Rondo catches Siku trying to fire upon a nearby yeti. Rondo expresses concern that Siku's desire to avenge his brother may endanger their expedition.

Outside of an unusual domed tower, the group falls into a hole that traps them in a subterranean cavern. Following the passageway, everyone eventually emerges in a hidden, lush valley where the yetis presumably came from.

Claire, Matt, Rondo, Kathleen, and Siku find a primitive village built by prehistoric hominids. Once the village is deserted, the five of them investigate and find a dead hominid who was apparently mauled in some sort of battle. Upon finding a third structure like the one near where they fell, Matt concludes the domed towers must be part of a hydroelectric system that controls the valley's temperate climate.

The five explorers ultimately discover a sanctuary filled with otherworldly technology including a mounted ray cannon and a massive spaceship. Inside the UFO, Matt recovers a device from the hand of a reptilian alien's decaying corpse that powers up the craft's consoles.

Holographic projections reveal that this alien race arrived on Earth 100,000 years ago and the cannon was a key component in their biological engineering endeavors to alter evolution. Claire theorizes the aliens were scientists from another world who created the hominids in the valley through experimentation before being wiped out by something monstrous.

Aliens suddenly capture everyone except Siku, who was standing guard elsewhere. Recognizing that their alien captors behave barbarically, Claire concludes drone workers rebelled against intellectually superior aliens to take control of the valley.

Claire, Matt, Rondo, and Kathleen are escorted into cages inside an arena where the aliens force hominids to fight a yeti for entertainment. Claire and Matt see how the captive yeti is manipulated when an alien fires a blast from the ray cannon into a device implanted in its head. Although the creature is otherwise intelligent, the ray causes it to savagely attack a hominid. Claire realizes the two types of reptilian aliens are actually the same species, but their experiments with hominid and yeti manipulation altered their animalistic desires.

Kathleen is released into the arena to face the yeti. Claire escapes her cage to protect Kathleen. Rondo also breaks free, and subsequently gets rescued from an alien attacker by Siku while trying to destroy the ray cannon.

Once Matt escapes his cage, he, Claire, Rondo, Kathleen, and Siku flee with spear-armed aliens in pursuit. Free from the ray's influence, the yeti acts on its natural instinct to protect the humans and opens the arena doors so they can escape. However, Claire pauses too long and gets shot with an arrow.

While the aliens brutally kill the yeti, Matt returns to the arena to man the ray cannon. Matt uses the cannon to blast a stone wall, which releases rushing water that drowns the aliens and floods their sanctuary.

Claire makes a recording that effectively identifies Matt as her successor in yeti research. Before dying from her wound, Claire also encourages Matt to partner with Kathleen to complete their book on the ancient civilization from another world. Afterward, Matt, Kathleen, Rondo, and Siku set out to return home.

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Review:

Pretty much everything you'll ever read or hear about "The Primevals," a throwback fantasy film mixing live action with stop-motion animation, includes some sort of summary of the unusual circumstances surrounding its creation. Knowing at least a little of the story behind the story is virtually essential for making sense of the movie's long, strange journey from an initial idea in the 1960s to the finished product's public premiere in 2023, and how that happened despite director David Allen dying in 1999. So, here are my Cliffs Notes of key moments in the Harryhausen-esque film's unlikely war against all odds to finally see the light of a projector bulb 60 years after starting out as an Edgar Rice Burroughs-inspired adventure.

Skipping over every little detail about the project's early evolution when the proposed title changed frequently and people like FX legend Dennis Muren were coming and going, "The Primevals" really started taking on a physical form in the late 1970s. End credits identify a number of notable names like ILM icon Phil Tippett as a contributor to the film's first footage in 1978, with comic book creator Duncan Rouleau and Pete Von Sholly among the artists sketching out storyboards.

Numerous stops and starts turned into a total stall until B-movie producer Charles Band became involved in the 1980s. It still took several more years to wriggle out of what seemed like an eternity of pre-production hell, but Band's Full Moon Entertainment eventually allocated a supposed seven-figure sum to "The Primevals" and principal photography took place in 1994.

When Full Moon's financial arrangement with Paramount Home Video fell apart, so did "The Primevals." Unable to complete the film without further funding, David Allen continued tinkering with it on his own until he passed away in 1999 at just 54 years old. Chris Endicott, who collaborated with Allen in stop-motion animation, inherited "The Primevals" footage, puppets, and burden of seeing the movie through to completion. Following a work-in-progress edit in 2002, a 2018 Indiegogo campaign raised only $41,441 of a $175,000 goal to get the rest of the work done, which is probably why it would be another five years before "The Primevals" finally debuted in front of an audience at the 2023 Fantasia International Film Festival.

Given everything above, expectations for the final cut can be calibrated different ways, with some viewers possibly anticipating either a painstakingly produced epic or a slipshod patchwork that shows the age of being made over multiple decades. Let's head off those extreme notions at the pass by first saying, no, "The Primevals" is not a "hidden gem" that prominently displays the input Muren, Tippett, and other idols of animated artistry had on the project. Neither is it a long-lost masterpiece of stop-motion wizardry to be put on a pedestal alongside the original "King Kong."

However, "The Primevals" is likely the closest an '80s or '90s monster kid will ever come to experiencing a "new" Full Moon film that actually feels like the imaginative oddities the company regularly released in its heyday. In the 21st century, Full Moon has contentedly drowned in a bottomless gutter where they treat fans as rubes by stitching together scenes from old movies and re-releasing them as "anthologies," or throwing up tasteless trash like the utterly irredeemable "Corona Zombies" (review here). Ever since Full Moon chose to prioritize pinching pennies by employing amateur filmmakers, using cheap digital cameras, and limiting feature lengths to only an hour, anything they distribute now barely resembles a professional production.

Accordingly, many of us former fans have sighingly wished there were some way we could reach back in time and pull out just one more campy classic along the lines of a proper "Puppet Master" or even an old-school "Trancers." Well, "The Primevals" answers what was previously presumed to be a futile prayer.

The plot is standard Saturday matinee stuff. A couple of academics learn yetis not only exist, they're being genetically mutated into savage beasts by unknown parties. Off everyone goes to investigate deep in the Himalayas, where the expedition team discovers a hidden reptilian race of alien invaders whose scientific experiments turned prehistoric hominids and abominable snowmen into arena combatants for entertainment.

Coupling that synopsis with the movie's complicated history, you might be led to believe "The Primevals" features more stop-motion mayhem than it actually does. After the opening sequence of a yeti's capture, there really isn't too much more animation until the last half-hour, when most of the aliens vs. humans vs. yetis vs. cavemen action occurs. The hour in between loads up on a lot of filler footage where the five explorers work their way through foliage, traverse across tundra, spelunk in underground caverns, and basically push to the next location until they reach the alien civilization's secret sanctuary.

Under ordinary circumstances, I'd dock big points for typical shortcomings such as fake-looking backgrounds and characters who speak in exposition. Except "The Primevals" is such a purely entertaining blast of '90s nostalgia, things normally considered cliche or cheesy are rather charming considering the context.

Some sets look like repainted foam rocks from "Land of the Lost." But "The Primevals" also ventures out in the wild in both Romania and Italy to shoot exteriors, too. That alone is more effort than can be found in any current Full Moon movie. In keeping with that old Full Moon vs. new Full Moon comparison, "The Primevals" has an atmospheric Richard Band score played by a symphony orchestra, not some guy with a keyboard and computer pumping out miscellaneous muzak. Actors also have other work on their IMDb pages, as opposed to being backyard bumblers who usually populate DTV titles nowadays.

The puppets resemble miniatures from "Jason and the Argonauts" and "Mighty Joe Young," which is either a positive or a negative depending on your POV for what passes muster in filmdom's new CGI-dominated frontier. Yet when you smilingly watch the yeti's fur sway from its animator's repositioning finger, the comparative smoothness of the animation echoes seeing Kong's hair weirdly wiggle the same way for the first time, enabling "The Primevals" to evoke some of that same childhood wonder and appreciation for the analog art. Suddenly, lines like, "The eyes of a dying giraffe can change a man, Mr. Connor" seem less laughable and more in line with the retro spirit of family-friendly fantasy "The Primevals" shoots for.

Taken with that in mind, "The Primevals" has to be considered a success worth the determined devotion put into it, both as a modest accomplishment in animation, certainly from a persistence and preservation standpoint, and as an enjoyable trip back to when simpler sci-fi was so satisfying. It may not be a landmark piece of filmmaking. Instead, "The Primevals" fills an empty void from when Full Moon was fun by delivering a uniquely retro lark, the likes of which we may never see again.

Review Score: 65

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