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.
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.
