Verdict
Summary
The Primevals is everything an adventure should be, and it resonates for fans of old school Hollywood filmmaking, episodic serials, and especially for those who grow tired of all the big budget Godzilla x Kong CGI fests that dominate the market these days. It’s inherently fun and good natured, with eye-popping stop motion effects (and plenty of them, not skimping at all!), and the performances are really genuine and special, particularly because they’ve been withheld for some 30 years. Richard Band’s score is very appropriate and heroic and noble, and the entire enterprise was well worth the effort to finally complete, restore, and release.
Plot:
An expedition to capture a yeti in the Himalayas turns into an adventure of a lifetime.
Review:
A yeti – the first ever spotted in modern times – is killed in the Himalayas, and once it’s brought back to a U.S. university for scientific research, it is decided that an expedition will be carried out (off the books) to see if another creature can be captured alive. Leading the expedition is Dr. Claire Collier (Juliet Mills), and she chooses PH.D student Matt Connor (Richard Joseph Paul), whose specialty is yetis and who was the first one to declare that they actually exist, but had no proof to back that claim up. They travel to India to recruit a safari guide and all-around adventurer, the retired Rondo Montana (Leon Russom), who is likely the only man who can take these two on the crazy adventure that awaits them. When they get to the Himalayas, they join forces with a research assistant named Kathleen (Walker Brandt) and her Sherpa, the loyal Siku (Tai Thai), whose family was killed by a yeti. As they follow every lead and trek into the wilderness, they discover a pathway down into hollow earth where an entire civilization has been living for thousands of years undiscovered. But they also discover that aliens landed and settled there and crossbred with lizards and humans, creating a whole new race of creatures and monsters … including the yeti! When they realize what they’re up against, they have to fight to survive and make it back to their world before the evil lizard people kill them!
A long fabled project I’d heard about for many years, The Primevals was begun in the early 1990’s by famed stop motion guru David Allen, who shot much of this film before he died in 1999, leaving it unfinished and in the realm of ultimate holy grails in its stagnant, unreleased form, but producer Charles Band finally resurrected it in 2019 and gave it over to Chris Endicott, who was an associate of Allen’s, who’d gone on to participate in big films like The Avengers movies later on. Endicott helped to complete the film, and the end result is so much better than I was expecting! The Primevals is everything an adventure should be, and it resonates for fans of old school Hollywood filmmaking, episodic serials, and especially for those who grow tired of all the big budget Godzilla x Kong CGI fests that dominate the market these days. It’s inherently fun and good-natured, with eye-popping stop motion effects (and plenty of them, not skimping at all!), and the performances are really genuine and special, particularly because they’ve been withheld for some 30 years. Richard Band’s score is very appropriate and heroic and noble, and the entire enterprise was well worth the effort to finally complete, restore, and release.
Full Moon’s new Blu-ray edition of The Primevals looks and sounds fantastic, though only the trailer is included. I would very much have appreciated a making-of feature, a commentary by Endicott and Band, or even members of the cast. It feels like a missed opportunity to not include any bonus features here, but I’m just happy to finally have this one in the collection, so no complaints!
