The Bottom Line: "There's no one to hear, you might as well scream They never woke up from the American dream And they don't understand, what they don't see" ~Etheridge
Friday night fright night gives me Primal, 81 minutes of pure hell. Written and directed by Steffen Schlachtenhaufen, no awards, an R rating for violence and language. Coolest thing about the movie? The guy that plays the creature’s real life name: Popeye Fontaine. What a moniker! And his only claim to fame, at least at this date.
We open with a couple trekking through the woods. Ain’t but a minute and Bimb and Bo are dead meat. Seriously, 3 minutes into the film and we see the creature already. Well, alrighty then. Cut to the next couple, seemingly to be wandering aimlessly until they come to the ranger’s cabin. They tentatively approach and even enter the cabin but, alas, the ranger is no where about. They decide to settle down outside and wait for him to reappear.
As it turns out, this couple are there with a purpose. The ranger is the brother of the lithe miss and they are going to try to convince him to return to civilization for her wedding. Seems Ranger Bob [don’t think that is his name but who cares?] has a little problem with city folk and prefers to snuggle down in the wilderness with the critters. That isn’t his only problem.
And, then, we have group three. A fine selection of woman and man hood if I ever saw one. Environmentalists? I don’t think so. They talk tree hugging talk but they don’t walk the walk. Isn’t all their fault though, they have been led astray by their leader. Doesn’t really matter, The Creature doesn’t care if you hug a tree or hug a root, you all taste the same to him.
Finally, with shame, The Creature. They refer to him as Sasquatch or Big Foot or The Creature. A man sorely in need of manicure and pedicure, our creature walks upright like a man, roars like a bear, body like an ape and the face, dunno. Can’t place it really; dog or wolf like mouth and nose but, dunno. Then the fur, a drug-laden mixture of Axel Rose and a bad Cher. It flows nicely, I’ll give it that.
All are converging in one area “where no man has gone before”… right, with all those meth labs around and cabins. Looks like man has gone there, or a very ingenious beaver.
On the upside, like in most of these type of films, they try to fill up bad film and poor dialogue with some beautiful landscape footage. Filmed in San Bernardino National Forest and Moreno Valley, CA., I truly enjoyed the beauty of the setting.
I find creature films fall in to two categories. In one they try to hide the critter until final reveal. Mainly because it is so poorly made they just don’t want to waste the film on it unnecessarily. In the other, they flaunt their critter, with all its warts, and let you see just how badly it is constructed. That is this film. They never hide the thing from you, you are always able to see just how bad the costume looks.
The kills? We view the aftermath, the discarded bodies. As far as the actual kill, they use that shake, rattle, and roll camera technique and we generally are watching from the ground up. This allows us better viewing of the critter. Mainly it is just red water thrown at the camera lenses, to indicate flailing blood.
Despite the fact that Ranger Bob has given his superiors countless photos of the creature, and the bodies continue to disappear from this area that no one is supposed to enter anyway, no one becomes concerned. That’s mucky mucks for you, don’t fix what they don’t consider broken. What’s a few missing people when you are talking about big bucks?
I never attempted to like this film from the start, therefore, I wasn’t disappointed. If not for the scenery, it would have been a total wash.
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