Enter production hell that is The Primevals, fifty years in the making that even outlived its creator. Yes, this dream passion project about evil lizard people already started way back in the late 1960s by stop-motion animators David Allen, Jim Danforth and visual artist Dennis Muren. The project went through several pre-productions throughout the 70s and 80s with several scripts and titles, such as The Glacial Empire and Primordium: The Arctic World. The British horror studio Hammer Films was interested in the project at one time in the 1970s, but it fell through due to creative differences. In 1978, David Allen met film producer Charles Band where he pitched the concept with the new title The Primevals, but again, it fizzled out because of reasons.
In the meantime, David Allen started to work with Charles Band with stop-motion effects in films such as Laserblast, The Dungeonmaster, Dolls, Puppet Master, Subspecies and Bride of The Re-Animator. He also worked in bigger productions like The Howling, Willow and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. So even though the name David Allen doesn’t ring any bells, and you’re a kid of the ’80s and ’90s, you’ve surely seen some of his standout work. Then the 1990s came and David Allen still refused to give up The Primevals, because the ’90s was after all the decade of optimism. And after Charles Band had some great success with his new-established company Full Moon, much thanks to a distribution deal with Paramount Home Video, he finally decided to produce the film. This would also be the most expensive and ambitious Full Moon film to date. The principal photography for The Primevals was completed in Romania in 1994 with some scenes shot in the Dolomites mountains in Italy, and the project finally seemed to reach the light outside the tunnel.
Then came post-production hell, a lot due to Full Moon ending their collab with Paramount Home Video and the money dried out. Allen did what he could to finish the project in his sparetime for the next five years until the pull got plugged when Allen died of cancer in 1999, age 54. RIP. Fast-forward to 2018 when Charles Band launched an Indiego campaign to collect over $40,000 to get the film finished once and for all. The post-production was then handed over to stop-motion animator Kent Burton and a small team of visual effects artists. The film was finally released in 2023 at the Fantasia Film Festival. The Primevals is now available on DVD/Blu-ray and Full Moon Streaming. Also check out the making-of documentary Lost To Time: Unearthing The Primevals.
So… the plot goes like this: We start off somewhere in a snowy mountains in Tibet where some locals fight against a big yeti, in pure Ray Harryhausen-style. After they defeat the yeti it gets taxidermied and brought to a University, and a small team of scientists go on an expedition to Nepal to search for its origin. The team is led by Matt Connor and the anthropologist Dr. Claire Collier, and they’re not the most interesting people to follow. But the plot thickens when they arrive in Tibet and discovers a mysterious futuristic-looking tower in the mountain. And then they suddenly fall through the ground after a quick avalanche and find themselves in a grotto. Luckily for them the entrance is not far away which leads them to a another pre-historic dimension, not so unlike what we saw in Nazis at the Center of the Earth (2012). But instead of nazis we have stop-motion lizards, aliens and other weird stuff. Good luck, have fun and don’t die.
I have to admit that I didn’t know about this project until recently, which to my understanding have been closely followed by more die hard Full Moon fans throughout the years. As going in more blind minus the hype and the anticipation, other than it looked interesting enough judging by the trailer, I’d say: It’s fine. It’s more impressive on the technical aspect than scriptwise. Some of the set-designs, matte paintings and use of miniatures look pretty remarkable, and you can also tell that every single penny was put on screen in terms of production value. The use of CGI, which there is very little of are added when necessary, just as it should. The element, besides the stop-motion, that gave me some extra tickle on the nostalgia bones, were the underground castles, that took me back to films like The 7th Voyage of Sinbad (1958). This is more or less a throwback film to a bygone era, as much as it is a passion project to showcase Allen’s love for stop-motion on the most epic scale he was able to reach. The sad thing is that he never got the chance to see the final product of his own magnum opus. What can you say… life’s not fair.
Then you have the human characters which are nothing much to speak about. It’s wooden and by default at its best, like most of Full Moon films where the stop-motion creatures have way more emotions than the actors. There’s some dead meat here and a lot of talking and exposition since the budget never reached the lengths to fully flesh out the pretty over-ambitious story on a visual standpoint. A very common issue when we have a concept that would need a bigger boat to reach the full potential. That said, the third act really pays it off with some fun stop-motion action, actors in ape/monkey costumes and more, and has overall enough of the retro charm to spark some classic sense of wonder that will make you feel like a kid again.
Director: David Allen
Writers: David Allen, Randall William Cook
Country & year: USA/Romania, 1994-2023
Actors: Juliet Mills, Richard Joseph Paul, Leon Russom, Walker Brandt, Tai Thai, Eric Steinberg, Robert Cornthwaite, Dolph Scott, Kevin Mangold, Jeffrey S. Farley, Billy Scudder
IMDb: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt9352178/
