THE PRIMEVALS is about an expedition to a forgotten land in search of ancient creatures untouched by evolution (but a little bit by aliens), and the incredible thing is that we as viewers are witnessing a similar miracle. The Ray-Harryhausen-esque fantasy film was first conceived and pitched in the late ‘60s by stop motion animators David Allen, Dennis Muren and Jim Danforth, and then had various false starts in the ‘70s and ‘80s, so by the time it was filmed by Allen with funding from Charles Band in 1994 it was already a throwback. Then Full Moon Entertainment’s financial situation stalled the completion of the animation, and the movie was left in limbo when Allen died of cancer in 1999.

You’d think that would be the end of it, but fortunately Allen left the storyboards and puppets with the right person – his friend Chris Endicott, an FX artist for many Full Moon and Marvel pictures. Another couple decades later, through Indiegogo funding and the hard work of many of Allen’s animator and VFX friends, the movie was completed and premiered at the Fantasia Film Festival last summer. I was able to see it a few weeks ago at the Seattle International Film Festival, and I had a great time with it.

It’s now on VOD, but if somehow you get a chance to see it on a big screen, don’t miss that opportunity. It’s a low budget affair but man is it cool to see what is clearly a small puppet representing a large creature being projected at an actual gigantic size. More importantly, it’s a movie with lots of sincere but hammy exposition leading up to little encounters with animated beasties that, if excerpted and strung together, would be a short film. On home video my smart-phone-damaged brain might’ve lost patience, but with an audience chuckling non-judgmentally at the adorable corniness and marveling at the monsters whenever they appear it felt like a real event for the weirdos who care about this shit (of which I am a card carrying member). I regret that I resisted my impulse to applaud the Full Moon Pictures logo at the beginning.

The story centers around a Yeti, an adorable red-furred guy who kinda reminds me of Beastman from Masters of the Universe (Christian name: Steve Beastman). A group of Sherpas in the Himalayas try to capture him, but he breaks the ropes and kills one of them before being buried in an avalanche.

I thought they were gonna freeze him, but he’s dead, next seen stuffed and on display at a college in the States. Claire Collier (Juliet Mills, The Nanny and the Professor, JONATHAN LIVINGSTON SEAGULL, WAXWORK II: LOST IN TIME) is a professor with a connection to the sherpas, who for some reason smuggled the corpse to her and allowed her to dissect it, proving the existence of Yetis to the world. Still, no one believes there are any more to be found, so it’s an act of defiance when she and Matthew Connor (Richard Joseph Paul, REVENGE OF THE NERDS II: NERDS IN PARADISE, VAMPIRELLA, OBLIVION) – a student whose Phd she rejected because of his it-turns-out-correct paper on the existence of Yeti – go looking for them. First they go to Calcutta to find a legendary guide named Rondo Montana (Leon Russom, DOUBLE DRAGON, THE PHANTOM, TRUE GRIT). They can’t find him until he rescues them from three stereotyped muggers. That scene and the limited English of the deceased sherpa’s younger brother Siku (Tai Thai, “Vietnamese Boy,” UNIVERSAL SOLDIER) are also from a land time forgot.

Needless to say they do find another Yeti, but also a race of hominids (ape people) portrayed by costumed actors, and a glass-domed tower that leads them to a hologram of a grey alien and eventually a race of savage lizard people who I believe are the titular Primevals. At any rate they’re my homeys now. When the team theorizes that they’re a race of drones brought by the aliens to do the work, how can you not side with them? They remind me of the aliens from MARS ATTACKS!, just these lanky, slithery, bug-eyed bastards wiggling around grunting little Donald Duck sounds at each other, putting our live action leads in cages, throwing spears at them, pulling levers on a laser cannon thing, etc.

The most elaborate part is an arena with a full audience of those guys, many of them moving. But it’s the simple pleasures, you know? A shot with a stop motion lizard fighting a costumed ape. The Yeti turning against them and fighting a mob of them, picking one up and hitting the others with him. And also non-animated goofiness like Claire turning for one last appreciative look at their discoveries as they’re fleeing, only to be hit with an arrow out of nowhere. Then making a death bed speech with a line that goes something like “Emotions – they’re beautiful, aren’t they?”

I really enjoyed the weirdness of this being a newly unfrozen 30 year old movie that would’ve already seemed ancient at the time. Never mind the stop motion, just think about these scientist characters and the way the story is told as compared to JURASSIC PARK, which came out a year before this was filmed. And here we have a movie that opens with an old-timey shot of fake snow blowing over a painting of mountains. By the way it’s one of Richard Band’s better scores, that really helps to set the retro adventure tone.

I didn’t want to frontload this review too much, but let me tell you some of Allen’s history to show you where this is coming from. He was one of those monster kids doing little stop motion movies at home and then graduating to Hollywood and becoming one of the go-to guys when somebody needed some stop motion shots. He did “special photographic effects” for that movie EQUINOX (1970), then FLESH GORDON. LASERBLAST was where he hooked up with the Band empire. He did stop motion on THE HOWLING, Q: THE WINGED SERPENT, the monkey in THE HUNGER, the George Miller gremlin part of TWILIGHT ZONE: THE MOVIE, he worked on THE STUFF and some giant ILM movies (YOUNG SHERLOCK HOLMES, *batteries not included, WILLOW, GHOSTBUSTERS II). And he did the ant in HONEY, I SHRUNK THE KIDS! Important work.

But he and his company David Allen Productions found their most steady work doing animation for all these Charles Band productions: TRANCERS, DOLLS, GHOULIES II, PUPPET MASTER, ROBOT JOX, BRIDE OF RE-ANIMATOR, SUBSPECIES, PREHYSTERIA!, SHRUNKEN HEADS, and so many more. Also FREAKED! Basically, he was the king of b-movie stop motion in the ‘90s, so of course THE PRIMEVALS was his passion project. And it’s beautiful to see his dream resurrected.

Allen is not the only FX legend who worked on this. He wrote the script with Randall William Cook, a fellow LASERBLAST/Q/Full Moon animator who became an animation supervisor for Weta Digital during the LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy. Model maker Dave Carson is an ILM guy who worked on THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK, DRAGONSLAYER, THE GOONIES, etc. Matte painter Jena Holman also did ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK and was visual effects supervisor for MIRACLE MILE. Five time Oscar winner (RETURN OF THE JEDI, COCOON, WHO FRAMED ROGER RABBIT, DEATH BECOMES HER, FORREST GUMP) Ken Ralston is one of the animators.

I also spotted Phil Tippett’s name in the credits among the crew who did pre-production on the movie in its 1978 incarnation, and I’m sure he was surrounded by other luminaries. THE PRIMEVALS is kind of the other side of the coin to Tippett’s MAD GOD. It’s another decades-in-the-making, seemed-like-it-would-never-be-finished, could-never-live-up-to-your-imagination dream project, but Tippett was pouring in every crazy artistic ambition The Man would never let him do. Allen’s began as too ambitious to be funded and then became too square, so it’s another side of the stop motion animator personality – the warm nostalgia for the movies he probly saw on Saturday afternoons, either at matinees or on TV, that made him want to make monsters. And if you see it you’ll want to make monsters too, or at least be friends with them.

I like to buy back issues of the genre magazine Cinefantastique when I find them for cheap. I recently got one with a cover story on THE PRIMEVALS, with the idea it had been trying to get off the ground for ten years, was finally happening, and they were going to cover its production in-depth as it happened. That was in 1978! Other upcoming movies covered in the issue include ALIEN and DAWN OF THE DEAD. This one took a little longer. It could be worse, though. The same issue has an article about another stop motion movie called WAR LORD OF TERRA (from Allen’s colleague William R. Stromberg) that didn’t happen at all.

The article is by one of the animators on the movie, Paul Mandell, and it goes into detail about Allen preparing a show reel to pitch a version called RAIDERS OF THE STONE RING. Hammer had agreed to produce it and were confused why he kept spending his own money on demo footage. The plot of RAIDERS sounds very similar to the finished movie except instead of the ape men there’s a society of surviving vikings – in fact, the weird ape men houses in the finished film were made back then, and they were supposed to be viking huts. The other big difference was that Allen wanted a scene where pterodactyls attack a zeppelin, but to his frustration Hammer got a little too excited about that and wanted to retitle the movie PTERODACTYL VS. ZEPPELIN.

Allen felt compromised by the studio’s changes to the story, so when they decided not to do it he was kind of relieved. He said, “It all seemed too superficial. It had no substance. The [Edgar Rice] Burroughs element was what I came to like least about it. It was sort of a pulp romance; I think that’s one reason why I moved away from it. I felt that Burroughs just didn’t have enough intellect in his material to get my senses totally involved… I wanted my film to be real. I wanted it to be credible. Burroughs heroes are incredible. In that respect, I felt that the original concept was just too juvenile for my own tastes.”

Sorry to say this, but Allen’s description of what the movie was supposed to be is pretty much the exact opposite of how it plays in 2024. According to the magazine, we’d be “asked to believe it, not merely accept it as something out of a fantasy world,” the latter being how Allen described the stop-motion-infused movies we’re all now comparing PRIMEVALS to. “I’d hate to try and sell it that way. Ray Harryhausen now operates in that fashion, and in some respects it makes it easier to put special effects across. But I’m trying to make THE PRIMEVALS work on a credibility level, and that’s not easy. There’s never been a picture like this. The last reel is totally fantastic in aesthetics, but wedded to a plot and premise that is rational.”

Well, shit. Sorry, Mr. Allen. That did not come to pass. Another quote in the article serves as a better prophecy: “But I think the personality of this picture will really triumph over any possible shortcomings.” That one did come true. I love the personality of THE PRIMEVALS, and I look forward to a long friendship with these little jerks.