David Allen's The Primevals

Cody watches a long-awaited Full Moon adventure.

David Allen was a legendary visual effects artist who earned an Oscar nomination for his work on the 1985 film Young Sherlock Holmes and would go on to work on high profile projects like Willow, Ghostbusters II, and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids – but he’s probably best remembered for the work he did on lower budgeted sci-fi and horror projects. Movies like The Howling, Q: The Winged Serpent, Bride of Re-Animator, and a whole lot of movies Charles Band produced for his genre companies Empire and Full Moon. When you marvel at the stop-motion effects in the likes of Dolls and Robot Jox, you’re marvelling at the work of David Allen. When you go back and see just how impressive the puppet effects were in the first five Puppet Master movies, that’s thanks to Allen and his team. Allen even directed Puppet Master II, which features an amazing stop-motion shot of the puppet Blade leaping off a bed and running at the camera. And while working on all of those movies, Allen was dreaming of someday being able to bring his own passion project to the screen. A sci-fi adventure film called The Primevals.

He first came up with the idea – a film that would combine live action with stop-motion animation to tell a story of yetis and reptilian aliens – in the 1960s. He pitched the idea to Band during their first collaborations at the end of the ‘70s, but the problem was that it was going to be very expensive to bring Allen’s idea to the screen. So for years, Allen and Band couldn’t get it off the ground. It wasn’t until the ‘90s that Band was able to put together some money for The Primevals and give Allen the greenlight to go into production. Filming of the live action scenes were completed in 1994, and Allen spent the next few years working on the stop-motion effects. He worked on them right up until he passed away from cancer at the age of 54 in 1999, leaving his passion project unfinished. It sat dormant for almost twenty years, until Band and Allen’s longtime associate / fellow special effects artist Chris Endicott were able to start putting the finishing touches on the film. Now work on The Primevals has been completed and the movie is starting to make its way out into the world, having its long-awaited premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival.

For longtime fans of Full Moon, seeing The Primevals is like receiving an incredible gift. This is a movie we’ve known about for decades, and for a time we feared that it might never be seen. But here it is now, and watching it is a return to the Full Moon heyday. The period when the company had a distribution deal with Paramount and access to larger budgets than they’ve ever had since. A period before the digital age, when all of their movies were being shot on film. Nearly thirty years after Full Moon’s Paramount deal ended, we have a newly released movie that takes us back to those days. It’s a cinematic time machine.

It begins with an amazing scientific discovery: Yetis truly do exist in the Himalayas! The corpse of one that was killed while going on a rampage is smuggled into the United States for study... and there’s something odd about it. It contains elements of both felines and canines, making it seem like it was genetically engineered, and it was suffering from chronic emotional arousal due to a barbaric brain surgery. Who is out there in the mountains, experimenting with Yetis? Hoping to find answers – and living specimens – anthropologist Claire Collier (Juliet Mills), Yeti theorist Matt Connor (Richard Joseph Paul), and  social anthropology PhD candidate Kathy Reidel (Walker Brandt) head out into the Himalayas on an unofficial expedition, joined by big game hunter Rondo Montana (Leon Russom) and local Siku (Tai Thai) – whose brother was killed by the rampaging Yeti, so he’s not totally on board with the idea of capturing one alive. Making their way through the mountains, they see sights they never could have imagined. Not only do they find a live Yeti, but they also see a village of prehistoric primates... and yes, cross paths with a dangerous group of reptilian aliens who turn out to be the mad scientists of the mountains.

The Primevals is a fun sci-fi fantasy adventure that’s not just a throwback to the Full Moon glory days but also feels like the sort of movie that would have been made in the ‘50s or ‘60s. (Or even ‘30s, going all the way back to King Kong.) We get some stop-motion Yeti action right up front and a bit more sprinkled in along the way, but the majority of the stop-motion work – the true drawing point of the movie – is packed into the second half of its 90 minute run. And these stop-motion effects are a dazzling sight to behold. They’re made all the more impressive by the fact that we know some of these effects were done twenty and more years apart, because there is no obvious difference between the stop-motion footage from ‘90s and the footage from modern day. The transition between decades of work is seamless.

Band and Endicott weren’t able to include every single sequence Allen envisioned for the film, it would have been too costly to do so, but they did finish everything that was absolutely required. The movie flows just fine, there are no apparent omissions. There are no unfinished effects on display, no “missing reel” moments. If Band hadn’t admitted in an interview that they didn’t put everything on the screen, I never would have guessed that the movie wasn’t everything Allen wanted it to be. He has said that he wants to put storyboards of the unused scenes as a bonus feature on an eventual release of the film.

It may be missing some effects Allen had in mind, but The Primevals is a joy to watch in its finished state. It’s a good piece of entertainment on its own. The viewing experience is even better if you’re a longtime Full Moon fan with nostalgia for the old days. And it’s very heartwarming that Band and Endicott chose to honor Allen by finishing his passion project long after he passed away. I’m really glad this movie exists, and once it’s available on home video there will be a lot more viewings of it in my future.