Director/Story – David Allen, Screenplay – David Allen & Randy Cook, Producer – Charles Band, Photography – Adolfo Bartoli, Music – Richard Band, Visual Effects/Stop-Motion Animation – David Allen Productions (Supervisor – David Allen), Visual Effects Supervisor (2019 Retrieval Crew) – Chris Endicott, Stop-Motion Animation (2019 Retrieval Crew) – Kent Burton, Visual Effects – Flat Earth, Inc. (Supervisor – Doug Beswick & Kevin O’Neill), Makeup Effects – Mark Rappaport Creature FX, Inc., Production Design – Milo. Production Company – Full Moon Features.
Cast
Juliet Mills (Dr. Claire Collier), Richard Joseph Paul (Matt Connor), Leon Russom (Rondo Montana), Walker Brandt (Kathleen Reidel), Tai Thai (Siku), Eric Steinberg (Tenzang), Robert Cornthwaite (Dr. Lloyd Trent), Dolph Scott (Kyle Norris)
Plot
Matt Connor goes to a lecture by anthropologist Claire Collier where she startles the assembled press by unveiling a full-size Yeti that was killed by an avalanche in the Himalayas. Matt feels vindicated in that he was ridiculed after submitting an academic dissertation on the existence of the Yeti. Claire shows Matt evidence that the Yeti has been genetically modified and undergone a brain implant. She asks him to join an expedition she is mounting to mounting to Nepal to investigate. Their expedition arrives in the area and they encounter a Yeti, following it through a strange tower to emerge in a fertile valley. They discover the area is inhabited by prehistoric hominids and come across a UFO that indicates the area was settled by alien lizard people hundreds of thousands of years ago. They are then captured by hostile lizard people hybrids and placed in an arena up against the Yeti and hominids.
The Primevals is a film that finally arrives on screens 56 years after its director/writer David Allen conceived it. This surpasses the production time it took for Orson Welles’s The Other Side of Midnight (2018) (48 years) and the 33 years for another famous stop-motion animated film, Allen associate Phil Tippett’s Mad God (2021). (Although the Welles film still wins if you count from the start of shooting as opposed to the start of planning and pre-production).
David Allen conceived The Primevals as a Stop-Motion Animation epic. The film began circa 1967 under the title Raiders of the Stone Ring. The original took place in England in 1925 as one man recounted his experiences as a biplane pilot aboard a Zeppelin and how they landed in a prehistoric lost valley filled with Vikings and came under attack by lizard people. A 25-minute long presentation reel was shot by Allen in 1968 to attract financing. The project was under consideration by Hammer Films who wanted to retitle it Zeppelin vs Pterodactyl – there is a poster announcing in circulation this as an upcoming production – but the film never came about. Allen then faced Disney making The Island at the Top of the World (1974), which used many of his ideas – the explorers in a zeppelin discovering a lost world inhabited by Vikings – and became disillusioned. The script was subsequently rewritten by fellow stop-motion animator Randy Cook, adding more elements.
David Allen (1944-97) is not a widely known name. Allen started work as a stop-motion animator on Gumby and became an assistant to Jim Danforth on Hammer’s When Dinosaurs Ruled the Earth (1970) and did work on films like Equinox (1970), Flesh Gordon (1974) and The Crater Lake Monster (1977). What gained him attention was a 1972 commercial for Volkswagen where he animated a parody of King Kong.
The Yeti rampages through the Himalayas in the opening scenes
Allen’s name popped up in the 1990s in a bizarre scandal after he married Donita Woodruff in 1995. She became jealous to find that Allen was still seeing his ex Valerie Taylor. This would be the normal run of the mill business of adultery until Donita found out that Valerie actually used to be a man Freddie Turner and was wanted on a murder charge, which a rancorous Woodruff saw to bringing to justice. Woodruff later wrote a book about it with Deadly Masquerade: A True Story of Sexual Secrets, Illicit Passion and Murder (2007).
When going forward to get the Laserblast job, Allen used the old Raiders of the Stone ring test reels to demonstrate his work and showed Band the script for The Primevals. Band gave Allen the opportunity to make his directorial debut on the Stone Canyon Giant episode of the anthology The Dungeonmaster (1984) and then one full-length film with Puppet Master II (1990). Band began financing The Primevals in the late 1970s. Allen started stop-motion work where his studio had on-board names like future Industrial Light and Magic supervisors Dennis Muren and Phil Tippet. An extensive article in Cinefantastique Vol 8. No1 (dated Winter 1978) announces that “The Primevals … promises to be a big prestige adventure-fantasy film for 1980.” However, this never ended up going any further than shooting of effects scenes.
(front to back) Juliet Mills, Richard Joseph Paul and Leon Russom menaced by alien lizard people
The release of Jurassic Park (1993) and the interest sparked in prehistoric films allowed Band to revive the film. Allen shot the live-action scenes back in 1994 but still needed time to complete the stop-motion animation for what then an intended 1996 release. The production was then beset by disaster. First, Band lost his distribution deal with Paramount and then Allen died of cancer in 1999. Production dragged out to 2001 amid dwindling finances. Band struggled to complete the film but the original 1980s stop-motion footage had degraded and required restoration. Band actively restarted this in 2019 with a crowdfunding campaign and eventually released the film theatrically in 2023.
In many ways, The Primevals still reads as a regular type of the film that Charles Band and co were putting out in the 1990s. The photography, the locations (in Band’s regular shooting grounds in Italy and cut-price studios in Romania) and the cast of B-list actors could all be interchangeable. Not to mention the familiar names on the credits – regulars like cinematographer Adolfo Bartoli, production designer Milo, Band’s brother Richard on score and Mark Rappaport, responsible for a host of cheap creature effects in Band films.
Apart from a quite impressive giant-sized stop-motion animated Yeti that turns up in the prologue and looks even more impressive stuffed and mounted in the lecture hall, I kept wondering what there was to The Primevals that was so exceptional that made it into a fifty-plus year labour of love. It looked a regular Band film, the sort that Band and his father Albert were putting out by the bucketload in the 1990s.
On the other hand, about 40 minutes in, almost about the halfway mark, The Primevals turn into something else altogether. The arrival at a hidden Lost World in the Himalayas is not any different on the face of it from other films like The Lost World (1925), The Island at the Top of the World, The Land That Time Forgot (1974) and Turok: Son of Stone (2008). In particular, one is reminded of tv’s Land of the Lost (1974-7) where dinosaurs, cavemen and alien lizard people mix. The opening where Juliet Mills unveils the Yeti is reminiscent of the beginning and ending of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Lost World (1912) and its various film versions.
The Yeti vs alien lizard people in the arena. With (l to r background) Juliet Mills, Richard Joseph Paul, Walker Brandt and Leon Russom
David Allen launches into this with a unique imagination. First there is the appearance of the hominids (who never do much in the story) but live in fantastical pod-like treehuts that sit atop root-like legs. The film becomes even more wildly imaginative when the party arrive at a pit that has a pyramid with raygun atop it and a UFO accessible only by a wooden ladder. Inside the UFO, the group find recordings left by the lizard-like aliens showing how they came to Earth thousands of years ago. (The only minor surprise is that though we get a prehistoric lost world, it is one lacking in any dinosaurs, perhaps because these were considered a cliché due to overuse in the abovementioned works).
It is a wild and heady mix throwing in Yeti, prehistoric humans, UFOs and alien lizard people. At this point, The Primevals seems to be taking a deep dive into fringe science theories about Ancient Astronauts and alien lizard people – indeed, the conception and shooting of The Primevals would appear to predate David Icke, the man most associated with promulgating in the alien lizard people phenomenon in his book The Biggest Secret: The Book That Will Change the World (1999).
David Allen’s masterpiece however is the arena sequence that culminates the film. Here the party are forced to engage in
Gladiatorial Combat against hominids and a Yeti that is being enraged as its brain is aggravated by a lizard people raybeam. There are some fabulous stop-motion animated fights, while the death of the Yeti has human-like expressions that make it not dissimilar to King Kong (1933) and Mighty Joe Young (1949). The only complaint with the film is that it is too short – we barely get to explore the valley before everything is brought to an end as Richard Joseph Paul triggers the ray device and causes a dam to collapse and bury the lizard people stronghold. (The climax where the lost world is destroyed usually a volcanic eruption is a huge cliché in the genre).
