"That Boy Wants To Bag A Yeti!"

David Allen's The Primevals and the joys of 'Rocktimism'

Here’s a question for you: is the classic adventure movie dead? Has the subgenre that kicked off with popular reads like King Solomon’s Mines, then continued through the cinemas with Gunga Din, Journey To The Centre Of The Earth, Temple Of Doom and various Lara Crofts, finally breathed its last? Have we had our fill of ruined temples obscured by vines, guttering torches illuminating the tombs of ancient kings, death defying fisticuffs aboard moving vehicles and complicated death traps? Indy’s last outing bombed, while other attempts at this sort of classic narrative, your Jungle Cruises and Uncharted-s, get slapped with postmodern irony and weightless CG effects and then bomb anyway; the lifeblood of the form is clotted with borderline and often out-and-out racist and imperialist tropes, and they cost shit loads of money to make. It all points to a form of storytelling that, cinematically at least, has crusaded its last crusade.

Speaking as one of the final generation of people to know what Gunga Din is, let alone to have seen it, I can’t help but feel that’s a shame. Those stories of derring-do and high adventure in foreign lands have been handed down from our great grandparent’s generation: starting in the boys-own adventure tales of the 19^th century, refreshed through magazines and comic books, then movies, TV series and video games in the 1980s, all the way to the present day. Despite the ever hovering and entirely justified accusations of imperialism that hang over these narratives, something about them works on an almost cellular level. When I think of the word ‘adventure’, I picture Indiana Jones negotiating the traps at the beginning of Raiders Of The Lost Ark, or Tintin exploring the temple of the sun. Those stories and images are bonded to my DNA, and there’s something sad about contemplating that they might have had their day, even while acknowledging that it’s probably not before time.

Which means that The Primevals has a lot to shoulder, feeling as it does like the last hurrah of this type of storytelling, complete with an expedition to a far-off land, an ancient civilisation at the centre of the earth, pit traps and wooden cages, and a whole bunch of stop-motion animated creatures. And that’s all before we get to the fact that the director has been dead for 25 years.

The lifelong passion project of director and special FX whizz David Allen - who worked on Honey I Shrunk The Kids, Willow and The Howling to name a few – The Primevals bounced from studio to studio for decades before Full Moon Picture’s Charles Band got involved, with principal photography completed by 1994. But money problems ensured that any work done to complete the film was sporadic until Allen’s death in 1999. An Indiegogo campaign was put together to get the film finished, and that, along with many of Allen’s former colleagues pitching-in and working for next to nothing, is what pushed it across the finish line in 2023. You can see all of that difficult history in the final product: the only thing that’s going to get a project with that kind of muddled genesis completed is passion, and The Primevals is a work of heartfelt love, both for its creator and the type of story it tells.

There’s no point going into detail about the plot. The Primevals is one of those rare delights where you can guess what’s going to happen from the opening two minutes. Suffice to say that when the fabled yeti is discovered in the Himalayas it brings up more questions than answers: How has it stayed unseen for so long? What has driven it down from the shelter of its snowy hideaway? and why does its brain show signs of surgical experimentation? As is the way of these things, a daring expedition is required in order to discover the truth, and so a plucky team of scientists, accompanied by a native guide and a cynical bushman, hit the peaks in search of the answers.

The Primevals is the type of film in which two scientists intently discuss a big brain in a jar, and thus the type of film in which the particulars of the story are secondary to the way it’s told. Thankfully it resists the temptation to wink at the audience. As the makers of The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull discovered, when you’re dealing with this particular flavour of adventure anything that distances the viewers from the action can be calamitous. Getting people on to the ride is hard enough, but making them stay put as the nonsense piles up is harder. As conspiratorial meta touches would amount to self-sabotage, you need a cast that go at it like it’s fucking Hamlet and thankfully there was a Mills on board to bring the steel. Juliet Mills- child of one of our sceptred isle’s greatest acting dynasties, auntie of the bloke from Kula Shaker – plays Dr. Claire Collier as the well-worn Professor Challenger type, but in a manner that expresses curiosity and vulnerability to balance the stiff-lipped pluck, and brings rare dignity to a film that involves bunches of extras in monkey suits. Richard Joseph Paul is Matthew Connor, the personification of white-bread dorkiness whose trail blazing theories have made him an outcast in the scientific community, and Leon Russom is here as Rondo Montana – yes, that’s RONDO MONTANA – hunter and tracker.¹ The cast is rounded out by Walker Brandt and Tai Thai as a scientist gone-native and a local guide respectively, and that’s it for the human characters, because nearly every other moving part is some manner of stop-motion animated cryptid.

If you’re a child of the 1980s and grew up watching Ray Harryhausen films on afternoon TV, then animatronic monsters have an appeal that goes straight to the lizard brain. Their exaggerated movements, gurning facial expressions and air of eccentric, twitching life so much more meatily satisfying than any amount of digital creations. That future generations will look back on CG creatures with the same fondness, I have no doubt. But for kids like me stop-motion will always have the magic. The Primevals delivers on this promise with relish. The Yeti is a beautifully expressive creature, with all its snarling rage and hidden soulfulness communicated in the slightest twitch, while the lizard race our heroes encounter are wonderfully malicious, squawking and stabbing with their pointy tridents and behaving like proper little bastards. The Primevals most resembles a moving Richard Corben comic, with the same use of bold colours and exaggerated textures bought to writhing life. It’s a fabulous, fully realised hyper reality.

And of course, there’s some terrific dialogue:

“That boy wants to bag a yeti, and he doesn’t care who he has to take down to do it!”

“You’re talking transmutation. Those species aren’t even distantly related!”

“The eyes of a dying giraffe can change a man, Mister Connor.”

Proper stuff.

The draw backs of a form made whole cloth from cliche are unfortunately present as well. No sooner have Dr. Connor and her square jawed lunk of a companion arrived in Nepal than they are immediately mugged by two blokes in ‘traditional’ garb, working alongside that most die-hard of dodgy characters: the weaselly guy with a colourful shirt, flick knife and inexplicably Hispanic accent. But it’s hard to get wound up when the proceedings are so joyfully absurd, and the script isn’t without its little subversions and surprises either. Rondo Montana - sorry, RONDO MONTANA - is a slightly more nuanced character than usually allowed in this type of thing, and the gasp-inducing revelation of the lizard men’s origins (BUM BUM BUUUM!) is a neat twist. The Primevals delivers what you want, the way you want it, but with just enough thought put into its mechanics to keep you strung along.

There ought to be a word for the feeling you get watching movies like The Primevals. Movies where the well-worn tropes and mouldy heroism of narratives that were decades old decades ago are given a new lease of life through the injection of passion and craft. It’s not a ‘guilty pleasure’, because there’s nothing cheap or trashy about something made with this much skill. And it’s not that depleted old saw ‘poptimism’ either, which has abandoned its aim of highlighting contributions from outside of traditional cultural narratives, and instead become a space for the terminally incurious to listen to the world’s most popular musicians and claim it as an act of orthodoxy smashing détournement. No, the experience of a film like The Primevals has to do with sincerity, defined by an earnest delight in pulp storytelling and the pleasures it can bring, rather than a praising of ephemerality for its own sake. Put simply, it rocks. Shall we call it ‘Rocktimism’?

The twin-fisted adventure has proven to be both cheap and lasting; locked in time but flexible enough to be refreshed, leaving it up to individual creators to add their own twists to those lost worlds, ancient monuments, strange encounters and daring escapes. If the sun is finally setting on this style of storytelling then it’s worthy of celebration that The Primevals, a painstaking celebration of the pleasure it can still bring and a movie that could be enjoyed by any audience in the last hundred years, should be its last sighting before it slouches back up the mountain to die.

1. At some point during my first watch I worked out that if you put Joseph Paul’s face on Russom’s head you’d have the spitting image of Daniel Craig. Seriously. You can’t stop seeing it once you’ve seen it.