The Primevals (2023 | USA | 90 minutes | David Allen)

It sounds strange with hindsight, but there was a time when stop-motion animation–that venerable, very analog special effects technique employed on behalf of everyone from King Kong to Jack Skellington–felt like it was gonna be a world-changer on the order of CGI.

Back in the day, among an admittedly small circle of professional stop-motion animators that included Oscar winner Phil Tippett, David Allen was one of the finest in the business, and he seemed likely to claim Ray Harryhausen’s mantle as stop-motion’s Once And Future Animation King. Allen’s clever Kong homage of a Volkswagen commercial won him an Emmy. His work on low-budget indie features like Laserblast and The Crater Lake Monster garnered further attention. Allen’s goal was to move stop-motion into more thoughtful, adult works of fantasy. And it looked like he was a stone’s throw from doing it. 

From the stop-motion boom in the early ‘70s all the way to its abject absence a couple of decades later, Allen worked in fits and starts on a passion project called The Primevals (sic). It was to be his big shot at updating and recreating the unjaded thrills of Edgar Rice Burroughs or Arthur Conan Doyle, only for grownups. But demand for stop motion work waned with the advent of the aforementioned Computer Generated Imagery somewhere in the mid-to-late ‘80s. Allen was now in the position of being an artist whose medium went all but extinct. Then David Allen died far too young at the age of 55, and despite principal live action photography being completed in 1994, the project stalled, seemingly for good. 

Enter Producer Chris Endicott, who was entrusted with Allen’s footage, notes, stop motion creature figures, and storyboards. Endicott oversaw the Herculean, years-long process of assembling Allen’s roadmap of ideas and material into a finished film. Some thirty years after live action footage wrapped (and some 25 years after the movie’s creative captain passed away), The Primevals has finally arrived, complete and as close to its creator’s vision as possible. And if the end product doesn’t live up to that adventure of a cinematic origin story, seeing Allen’s unique, beautiful old-school SFX monsters in full grandeur on the Egyptian’s massive screen represented the most joyous of nerd-gasms for a devoted, if niche, audience of worshippers—myself resolutely included. 

The action proper begins right out of the gate, with a team of Sherpas in the Himalayas battling and defeating a giant ape-like monster. Scientist Claire Collier (Juliet Mills) becomes custodian of the beast’s skeleton and brain, and she’s convinced that the creature in question must be a Yeti. Soon, she’s assembled an exploration team to find a real live Abominable Snowman, and they find themselves contending with an underground universe of other, even more uncanny creatures on their journey.

The setup’s pure pulp, the kind of Saturday matinee fun that flies highest when given the lavish treatment allowed to Harryhausen spectacles like First Men on the Moon and Mysterious Island. By comparison, the live-action portion of The Primevals shows its budgetary seams. Old pro Mills aside, the cast’s a pretty wooden lot, and the overall functional, threadbare quality seems typical of production benefactors Full Moon Features, the Charles Band-fronted indie studio characterized for its largely direct-to-video frugality.

Ultimately and thankfully, Allen’s creativity and zest for old-school adventure win the day. If the live-action component of The Primevals feels direct-to-video rinky-dink, the intricate detail of Allen’s design work, and the rogues’ gallery of lovingly-wrought monsters dwelling in his pocket universe, become something damn near magical on a big screen. Don’t expect the antiseptic photo-realism of most modern CGI: Do expect a sterling example of an under-appreciated but ravishing art form, bearing the unmistakable signature of one of the form’s finest practitioners. If you can’t catch it in a theater, at least catch it on the biggest screen you can.

Streaming MAY 20 – MAY 27: The Primevals also comes out on deluxe blu-ray from Umbrella EntertaInment in August.