Primal

Directed By: Josh Reed

Starring: Krew Boylan, Lindsay Farris, Rebekah Foord, Damien Freeleagus

Synopsis:

Anja and five friends join anthroplogy student, Dace, on a journey to study a remote, ancient rock painting. Their excitement vanishes when Mel becomes delirious after skinny-dipping in the waterhole. Feverish, bleeding, confused, she physically and mentally regresses to a vicious predatory state. Mel has gone primal. Mel's lover and friends realise they are the prey as she savagely hunts them down. Before they can escape another one of them starts to regress, posing a hideous choice; kill their friends or be killed by them. Their only hope of survival is through a cave, where Anja learns too late the meaning of the ancient rock art they came to study.

Review:

I heard that this went down well at the 2010 Fright Fest. I find that hard to believe unless it was the last movie on the bill and people slept, and dreamt an entirely different movie to the one that I saw on Blu-Ray. If you’re familiar with my reviews, you know that I don’t like being negative. I know and understand what goes into movie-making and the hard work that it can be, but sometimes, I despair and this is another occasion for me to sink into a pit of awful movie watching despair.

I’ll get the positives out of the way first. The acting is good. The look of the movie is interesting, given the budget, and the physical make-up effects are top notch and comparable to most Hollywood horror movies.

Sadly, none of this was enough. The movie opens with scenes set 12, 200 [sic] ago with an aborigine falling victim to something and leaving a bloody handprint on cave drawings like an early version of Banksy.

We then cut to the movie proper where we are introduced to a bunch of irritating characters given rubbish dialogue. Perhaps the screenplay was trying to be funny but it just comes across as unnecessarily coarse with no fun factor. The discussion as to why one of the characters won’t use the “C word” has no comedy value or telling insight into the characters. The scene of the characters driving to the site that no-one’s bothered visiting for 120 years reminded me a little of The Evil Dead; substitute the cabin for a few tents and we have the beginning of a “homage”.

The film as a whole reminded me of The Lost World – a surprisingly entertaining low budget action series with imaginative storylines set in a jungle environment that aired in the late nineties. In fact the story of a naturally occurring virus possessing people, originating from a cave, could have been lifted from that very series, as “homage”.

After another series of inane conversations that set my teeth on edge, and a horrendous and overlong campfire song, one of the girls goes skinny-dipping and emerges with a lot of leeches covering her body. Everything is so matter of fact. Oh, she’s got leeches on her, we’ll get rid of them and then go to bed, job done. This is the same, tonally, as a ridiculous stuffed rabbit that is found with teeth rivalling Janet Street-Porter. One of the guys just sticks it on a branch as if normal people do that. Its ok, it’s just a rabbit with extraordinarily large and vicious teeth, stick it here and no more will come by. Oh, and I never noticed the unusually blood red eyes on the critter. The treatment of the sick girl is fairly odd too, but I’d lost interest waaaay before this. I awaited the transformation that I knew was coming. It was on the cover art and looked quite good. Except…it doesn’t. The Blu-Ray artwork shows the actress from the neck up and seeing the teeth, it reminded me of Lamberto Bava’s Demons (due out from Arrow Films sometime this year). Seeing the actress crouched in attack mode, there was no palpable menace. I didn’t feel that there was much of a threat. Sure, the girl appears to have super strength and is able to leap through the air but I didn’t find the actress convincing at all.

What follows from the transformation is a series of attacks on the camp. Whilst she’s chomping down on her latest victim, her boyfriend tries to persuade the survivors that she’s just sick: Oooooo-kay. Realistically, she could have taken out the entire bunch of wimps in a few minutes but that would make for a mercifully shorter movie.

I mentioned The Lost World earlier and the CG in this movie belongs to that era (the era of when the show aired not the era the show was set in, believe it or not.) There’s a hideously rendered main creature that seems to be the root cause of the issue. When it is attempting to impregnate the heroine, I thought again of The Evil Dead, but this time, the girl was wearing clothes. There wasn’t much hope of an impregnation, yet the creatures slams it’s bits against hers in a silly scene that made me cringe.

I was relieved when it was all over.

Summary:

Borrowing heavily from various genre pictures including The Evil Dead, Cabin Fever, and The Ruins, I’m not sure who this movie Primal is aimed at. It’s neither a funny send up or a competent horror. Why there seems to be a trend of writing inanely irritating characters now, (citing Paranormal Activity as an example) I can’t answer, though to be fair, the whole screenplay should have been consigned to the waste paper basket. Given the pedigree of people working on this movie I’m surprised that it’s worse than most low budget horrors. I can’t recommend it and advise that you look to better quality movies for your horror fix.

2 out of 10 (Wayfarer)

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