THE PRIMEVALS

 

A publicity poster for The Primevals, highlighting the yeti (© David Allen/Castel Film Romania/Full Moon Entertainment – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

The stop-motion monster/sci fi movie that I watched on 5 August 2024 was a staggering 55 years in the making from original concept to eventual release last year. Thankfully, however, it took me less than a day from discovering it online on 4 August to watching it on 5 August, and what an incredible treat it was!

Directed and co-written by the veteran stop-motion film and TV animator David Allen (who had also created in 1968 the short presentation film Raiders of the Stone Ring from which this feature-length movie ultimately evolved), and released in 2023 by Full Moon Entertainment, The Primevals opens with the killing in Nepal of a huge and highly aggressive yeti by a group of sherpas, assisted by a timely avalanche. But after its enormous carcase is successfully smuggled into the United States, and as a spectacular mounted specimen is publicly displayed to great acclaim, a scientific expedition led by anthropological expert Prof. Claire Collier (played by Juliet Mills) is swiftly assembled.

Its team includes one of her ex-postgraduate students, Matt Connor (Richard Joseph Paul), whose controversial PhD thesis had lately been rejected because it had dared to propose that the yeti was a real, undiscovered species (as this new discovery has now sensationally confirmed), not a myth (as mainstream zoologists had always traditionally deemed it to be). And when the exotically-named Rondo Montana (Leon Russom), a both burly and brainy Indiana Jonesian ex-big-game hunter, is hired as their guide, tracker, and bodyguard, the team duly treks through the Nepalese Himalayas in the hope of observing and possibly even capturing a living yeti.

They also wish to discover an answer to the riddle of why their preserved yeti's brain contains a deep, mysterious lesion, as if something – or someone – had cut through it but without killing the creature.

What they do discover, however, is beyond their wildest dreams – and nightmares. Namely, a hidden prehistoric realm populated not only by yetis as well as by primitive hairy pithecanthropine hominids but also by a race of reptilian aliens whose spacecraft had crash-landed here 100,000 years ago, when they were much more advanced in form and benevolent in behaviour than they are now. For due to their subsequent experiments here on Earth with gene splicing in a bid to improve their form in order to survive more effectively in this chilly montane climate, they inadvertently transformed themselves into the cruel, savage, retrogressive reptiles that they are today.

So much so, in fact, that they capture yetis, subject their brains to laser-like rays that turn them hyper-belligerent, and then stage horrific gladiatorial bouts in a specially-constructed arena for their own sadistic entertainment, in which a brain-frazzled yeti is pitted against captured pithecanthropines – the poor doomed proto-humans only lasting as long as it takes the yeti to smash them into pulp with one fist, i.e. not very long at all.

But what happens to the scientific team when they too are captured by these loathsome lizard-men and released into the arena as a maddened yeti's latest opponents? I'll say no more, so that you can enjoy finding out for yourself when you watch – as watch you must! – this marvelous movie.

 

A second publicity poster for The Primevals, highlighting the reptilian aliens (© David Allen/Castel Film Romania/Full Moon Entertainment – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

Its plot is certainly fantastical, but equally it provides plenty of adventure and escapist fun. Also, it is one of the very few sci fi movies that I can recall in which extraterrestrial aliens and cryptozoological creatures both appear, making it doubly interesting to connoisseurs of the controversial. Happily, therefore, the stop-motion reptilian aliens and yetis (supplemented by some animatronics and puppetry in certain scenes) are absolutely superb throughout – Ray Harryhausen would have definitely approved. Indeed, the entire movie is redolent of his own much-loved First Men In The Moon and The Valley of Gwangi stop-motion film classics.

Tragically, however, David Allen, who had originally conceived this movie back in the late 1960s, and had tenaciously weathered as its director its seemingly unending gestation period throughout the remainder of his life, never lived to enjoy his cinematic labour of love finally being officially released in Canada during 2023, and a year later in the United States. Instead, he had died from cancer in 1999, aged just 54, but he had completed filming the live-action scenes in Romania and most of the stop-motion ones in 1994, so he'd at least been able to see the movie in virtually finished form.

What caused such a huge delay to the movie's progression after Allen's death were finance problems and seeking a company sufficiently interested in it to provide the extensive backing and publicity that such an ambitious, enterprising project required, resulting in it being shelved, beginning a production-hell hiatus that winded up lasting roughly 20 years. But after fellow producer/director Charles Band's Full Moon Entertainment stepped into the breach (Band was a longstanding friend and admirer of Allen's work, and in the 1990s had agreed to become this movie's producer), these issues were ultimately resolved, with the final stop-motion scenes being filmed in 2022 following a successful online fundraising campaign launched by Band in 2018 raising US $40,000 to finance their production – overseen by this movie's original special-effects expert, Chris Endicott.

Worth noting, incidentally, is that in addition to the standard version of this movie, a special extended director's cut, 'The David Allen Version', containing an extra seven minutes of footage, has also been produced. Of particular interest is that various additional prehistoric animals that were storyboarded but did not finally appear in the standard version are animated into this extended one, which includes, fot example, a scene featuring the team fleeing from a dinosaur-like monster.

The Primevals has only just been officially released on DVD and Blu-Ray, but for those wishing to view this movie immediately there are actually two separate full uploads of it presently on DailyMotion that you can watch and download free and legally for personal viewing if you use DM's own downloader. Click here, therefore, to access one of these uploads, the one that I watched and thoroughly enjoyed. Or, for a tantalizing taster, click here to watch on YouTube an official trailer for The Primevals.

Certainly, if you adore as I do the superb stop-motion monsters from the golden Harryhausen-led era of cryptozoology-/mythology-themed creature features, you will definitely not want to miss watching this glorious homage to those timeless, iconic movies, that's for sure!

Finally: to view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.

 

A third publicity poster for The Primevals, featuring both the yeti and the reptilian aliens (© David Allen/Castel Film Romania/Full Moon Entertainment – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

 

TERRORDACTYL (aka JURASSIC WARS)

 

My official UK DVD of Terrordactyl (subsequently retitled Jurassic Wars) (© Don Bitters III & Geoff Reisner/3^rd Films/Terrordactyl/Marvista Entertainment/4Digital Media/Sony Pictures Home Entertainment – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

My film watch on 25 March 2022 was the fun monster-themed B-movie Terrordactyl (subsequently retitled Jurassic Wars).

Directed by Don Bitters III (who also wrote its screenplay) and Geoff Reisner, and released in 2016 by 4Digital Media, Terrordactyl is a great comedy creature feature in which a shower of meteors landing over Los Angeles turn out to be – wouldn't you just know it? – a mass landing of pterodactyl eggs, because it turns out that these flying reptiles didn't die out 65 million years ago at all.

Instead, when the asteroid hit Earth and wiped out the dinosaurs, the pterosaurs escaped into Outer Space, where they've been circling around ever since, waiting for their chance to return and reclaim their world, and now they have. In other words, a crazy plot that is every bit as off the planet as the pterodactyls have been!

Happily, two bold gardener buddies Lars (Christopher Jennings, who is also one of this movie's several executive producers) and Jonas (Jason Tobias), plus gun-wise waitress Candice (Candice Nunes), assisted by booze-sozzled ex-marine Sampson (Jack E. Curenton) and (briefly!) Candice's sultry room-mate Valerie (Bianca Haas), are there to save the day – which is just as well, as otherwise LA seems to be entirely deserted!

Amusingly, Jonas actually remarks upon this truly bizarre anomaly, to which Candice replies that it's because everyone else are all in hiding. Far more likely, at least imho, is that most of the movie's budget was spent (albeit profitably) upon its very effective, imposing CGI pterodactyls, so that there was not enough left to hire secondary actors!

 

Lars (played by Christopher Jennings), suddenly discovering the spine-chilling reason why he has been abducted by a pterodactyl and brought to their nest of eggs, all of which are about to hatch and release a horde of ravenously-hungry baby pterosaurs! (© Don Bitters III & Geoff Reisner/3^rd Films/Terrordactyl/Marvista Entertainment/4Digital Media/Sony Pictures Home Entertainment – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

All of the characters that are present, however, are very likeable, especially long-suffering Lars, who has to put up with all manner of annoyances, including his beloved truck being destroyed by one of the pterodactyls landing upon it, and then being abducted by another one to serve as live food for when their youngsters hatch. Happily, lucky Lars is able to avoid this hideous fate (unlike another abductee, the decidedly luckless and soon to be definitely lifeless Johnny…), and thereby lives to fight another day, and a fair few additional pterodactyls.

Chief (in every sense) among the latter is the ginormous queen pterodactyl. Yes indeed, within the wacky world that is Terrordactyl it turns out that these flying reptiles are eusocial, with the (relatively) smaller males caring for the eggs laid by a single colossal female. All totally inane and insane, but very funny and exceedingly enjoyable throughout!

For what is basically a relatively low-entry creature feature, the CGI pterodactyls of Terrordactyl, created by Los Angeles-based 3^rd Films, specializing in spectacular visual effects (click here to view some show reels), are unequivocally impressive (apparently, no puppet or animatronic, physical ones were used, despite what various reviews elsewhere have claimed). Indeed, they readily transform what might otherwise have been a humorous but bog-standard, undistinguished  B-movie into a genuinely engrossing, compelling feature.

In short, I can definitely recommend Terrordactyl to anyone who enjoys monster movies and has enough willpower to suspend all disbelief regarding its zany, preposterous premise!

If you'd like to view an official Terrordactyl trailer and thus take wing upon a brief but truly hilarious flight of fancy (in every sense!), be sure to click here in order to watch one on YouTube.

To view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.

 

Publicity poster for Terrordactyl (© Don Bitters III & Geoff Reisner/3^rd Films/Terrordactyl/Marvista Entertainment/4Digital Media/Sony Pictures Home Entertainment – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

 

THE EXTRAORDINARY ADVENTURES OF ADÈLE BLANC-SEC

 

Publicity poster for The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (© Luc Besson/EuropaCorp – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

Given the choice of viewing a foreign-language movie that has been dubbed into English or has been supplied with English subtitles, I would always choose the former option, as I hate having to take my eyes off the movie almost continuously in order to read the subtitles. Not so long ago, however, I watched a couple of French movies of the latter type that were so riveting I scarcely even noticed myself glancing down at the subtitles. The films in question were The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec (reviewed by me below) and Micmacs (reviewed by me here).

As I was soon to find out, The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec is nothing if not aptly entitled, including as it does the unlikely likes of a giant revitalized pterodactyl and an entire court of revived Egyptian mummies!

Directed by celebrated French director/producer/screenwriter Luc Besson, who also wrote its screenplay, and released by EuropaCorp in 2010, The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec combines the plots of two separate comics produced by comic-book graphic artist Jacques Tardi, respectively entitled Adèle and the Beast (1976) and Mummies on Parade (1978), both featuring Tardi's fearless heroine Adèle Blanc-Ser as their lead character, and incorporates them within a basic plot devised by Besson. This means that the movie, mostly set in the early second decade of 20^th-Century Paris, contains two initially quite separate storylines that subsequently converge to amusing but also sometimes confusing effect.

One of these sees the movie's eponymous adventuress (played with spirited, glamorous éclat by Louise Bourgoin), who is a well known journalist and travel writer, seeking amid Egypt in best intrepid Indiana Jonesian fashion the mummy of Patmosis, apparently the personal medical doctor to the great pharaoh Rameses II. Despite some hairy encounters with her deadly, goblinesque rival Prof. Dieuleveult (Mathieu Amairic) during this search, Adèle ultimately succeeds in uncovering Patmosis's mummy and returning safely with it to Paris, where she hopes that the brilliant but eccentric and decidedly etiolated scientist Prof. Espérandieu (Jacky Nercessian) can revive it.

The reason why Adèle wishes this to happen is that when much younger, she accidentally incapacitated her sister Agatha during a game of tennis. So she now hopes that Patmosis possesses superior medical knowledge from the ancient Egyptian civilization that he can employ to free Agatha from her ongoing comatose state and restore her to her former fully-active, cognisant self.

Unknown to Adèle, however, is that while she had been seeking Patmosis's mummy in Egypt, Espérandieu's arcane experiments in telepathy and telekinesis had somehow resulted in his successful hatching of a fossil pterodactyl egg in Paris's Gallery of Palaeontology and Comparative Anatomy – in turn engendering all manner of chaos and carnage across the city after this predatory prehistoric beast had rapidly grown to full size and escaped. Accordingly, Espérandieu had been arrested and was now facing imminent execution. So if Patmosis is to be revived, Espérandieu needs to be rescued, while a motley assortment of oddballs and incompetents is adding even further to the melée of mayhem as they seek to slay the increasingly irate pterodactyl. Never a dull moment in Paris, that's for sure!

But to cut a lengthy and exceedingly involved story short (I've only touched upon a few of its multitudinous threads here!), Patmosis is finally revived, only for him to inform a horrified Adèle that he is not a medical doctor, but rather a doctor of nuclear physics – a physicist as opposed to a physician! (Seemingly, Ancient Egypt was indeed a lot more advanced in scientific matters than we'd expected!) However, he does possess the skills to revive the mummy of Rameses's real doctor, not to mention those of Rameses himself and his entire court, all of whom just so happen to be currently on display at the Louvre.

Patmosis duly achieves this, which leads to my favourite non-pterodactylian scene of the entire movie, in which the revived (CGI-animated) mummies decide to step outside of the Louvre and discover for themselves what a Paris evening in the 20^th Century AD is like. Their stately, elegantly-mannered demeanour, behaving with immense courtesy and charm like a parody of some genteel English tea party, is quite delightful and hilarious to behold, especially when various unsuspecting Parisians going about their innocent way encounter this resurrected retinue and flee in hysterical terror.

But you'll never guess what happens to the pterodactyl, whether Adèle's sister is indeed healed, and how the doomed RMS Titanic enters this tortuous tale! Which means that you'll have to watch The Extraordinary Adventures of Adèle Blanc-Sec yourself to find out!

For a tantalizing trailer (with English subtitles) to give you a glimpse of the spectacle to expect from this ever-so-slightly manic but marvelous movie, however, be sure to click here and watch one on YouTube!

To view a complete chronological listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE, and please click HERE to view a complete fully-clickable alphabetical listing of them.

 

ISLAND OF THE LOST

 

The official American NTSC-format videocassette of Island of the Lost (© John Florea/Ivan Tors Productions/Paramount Pictures/NTA Home Entertainment – reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)

On 20 June 2020, longstanding friend Mike Playfair brought to my attention on YouTube an apparent featurette, just 30 mins long and dating from 1967, entitled Island of the Lost, in which a family led by the father, eccentric anthropologist Josh MacRae, played by veteran Robin Hood actor Richard Greene, become stranded on a mysterious, hitherto-uncharted South Pacific island inhabited by various scientifically-undiscovered but decidedly belligerent beasts and visited by a war-like native tribe from some neighbouring island. Not surprisingly, they spend the remainder of the movie doing their utmost to escape back to civilisation, but not only do they have the afore-mentioned foes to face, this benighted company also have a temperamental volcano and some deeply unsettling ground tremors to contend with. This is precisely what happens, of course, if you don't hire a professional tour guide when visiting some far-flung location off the beaten track - sorry, but they really should have stayed at home!

Greene's principal co-star is Luke Halpin, playing MacRae's son Stu, and still remembered today from his time as a child actor in the hugely popular dolphin-starring 1960s TV show Flipper. Also present is Jose De Vega, playing a youthful native named Tupuna, who'd been abandoned on this island by his people as a coming-of-age test of his courage to survive there alone, but after being rescued by MacRae's family when they arrive and find him close to death, he becomes their friend and helper.

Anyway: as soon as I saw the scene in this featurette that includes a flock of carnivorous ostriches with horn-like head protuberances plus a bizarre saw-like ridge running along the centre of their back reminiscent of the prehistoric pelycosaur Dimetrodon's, I knew that I'd watched it before. However, I distinctly remembered it being part of a feature-length movie, one that I'd viewed many years ago on TV (and on at least a couple of separate occasions).

Sure enough, when I investigated further, it had indeed originated as a 92-min feature – specifically an American adventure-style monster movie directed by John Florea, produced and co-written by Ivan Tors (who had also produced the afore-mentioned show Flipper), and released by Paramount Pictures in 1967. Consequently, I have no idea why the greatly-truncated 30-min featurette was subsequently produced. The full movie was entitled Island of the Lost when originally released in the UK, but has since acquired various other monikers.

Island of the Lost was shot in the Bahamas and parts of Florida, so the tropical flora and lush scenery are natural – the decidedly unnatural fauna, conversely, are another matter entirely. Imho, the creature production quality in this film is abysmal – indeed, it's so bad that it's good! For in addition to its veritable Rhodesian ridge-backed ratites noted earlier here, where else could you find a pack of so-called sabre-toothed wolves that are actually Alsatians and huskies sporting a set of false fangs? I kid you not! At least their pet sea lion is normal!

In short, don't expect to encounter any Harryhausen-level creations in Island of the Lost, but in a sense that adds to this movie's charm. Also, it's refreshing to see a cryptozoology-themed flick that is not of the prehistoric survivor/lost world genre but instead features a locality containing entirely novel, wholly unknown, undiscovered modern-day cryptids. True, in one scene anthropologist MacRae proclaims: "There are things on this island we all thought were completely extinct". However, he should be made aware that a creature can't be extinct (completely or otherwise!) if it had never existed to begin with! And there is certainly no presence as yet in the known fossil record of anything resembling the bizarre beasts encountered on this particular island, that's for sure! Nevertheless, this is an enjoyable, fun film, offering a nostalgic return to those family-friendly adventure movies of half a century ago now that thrilled rather than chilled the more youthful sections of its audience, and for me was an absolute pleasure to chance upon again.

Indeed, after rediscovering Island of the Lost, albeit in its truncated featurette format on YouTube, I began searching straight away for the full-length original movie on DVD. Unfortunately, I was only able to find an American Region 1 version whose front cover picture depicts a teeth-snarling green-skinned humanoid entity of terrifying demeanour that never appears anywhere in the actual movie! An American NTSC-format videocasssette version that I also spotted online has a far superior front cover illustration (and which I have used as this present Shuker In MovieLand review's opening picture), as long as we ignore the fact that its portrayed pterodactyl and rhino-horned crocodile don't appear in the movie either!

Sadly, I have been unable to track a UK-compatible version of this film, i.e. either as a Region 2 DVD or as a PAL-format VHS videocassette, always assuming, of course, that it was ever released in either format here in the UK. Consequently, I finally relented and a while ago I purchased the American DVD (notwithstanding its misleading horror-themed front cover), as I do have a multi-region DVD player that can play it. So I have since been able to watch Island of the Lost in full for the first time in many years.

The above-mentioned featurette version of Island of the Lost no longer appears to be on YouTube. Instead, however, the entire movie (albeit of somewhat inferior visual quality) is presently available there for free viewing. So if you've never seen sabre-toothed versions of Man's best friend, not to mention Dimetrodontian ostriches, now's your chance to make up for lost time – just click here and all will be revealed!

And to view a complete listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE!