Primevil Review

• 14th Mar 2011

Primevil is a low budget action/horror genre flick with rather hopeful Predator and The Descent aspirations.

Two gals and three guys are yachting in remote Southeast Asian waters when they happen upon an injured dude and take him on-board. Injured dude then inexplicably shipwrecks them and dies(?!) leaving our five to fend for themselves on an island seemingly populated by an aggressive and mysterious ‘missing link’ species of hominid.

Hmmmm……

So Lance Henriksen ‘stars’ (if you’re wondering why the word is in inverted commas; it’s because he’s only in about 3 scenes). I always feel this is a little disingenuous to the principle (but less well known) actors, although I guess it’s one of those ‘paying your dues’ things.

I’m afraid I can’t even begin to make much sense of the plot of this movie. Henriksen seems to be some kind of Papally sanctioned clean up man, brutally bumping people off left right and centre due to an overambitious and under-described subplot involving the ‘church’ trying to cover up the existence of the hominids as they somehow disprove the whole Adam and Eve thing.

As you can tell, this subplot is kinda loose, like the rest of the movie and Henriksen is superfluous to requirements; phoning his brief performance in before being ‘bishoped’ from behind (he even makes the face!) and presumably tiptoeing off to cash his cheque and hope no-one noticed him doing it.

The rest of the movie involves our pretty unlikeable group of shipwrecked yuppies being bumped off one by one until just one plucky girl (Emily Foxler) is left.

The bare faced plagiarism employed in Primevil runs from the sublime to the unbelievable and amounts to two really big ‘takes’ from Predator.

Firstly there’s the thermal vision effect. The producers change only a little by making the point of view vision of the creatures a sort of black & white version of the Predator effect….oh dear!

The second main rip (there are further, more subtle ones) is when our heroine is being chased down by the super agile beasties (yet still staying ahead of them?!) and after a quick uncontrolled bum-ride down a mudslide (familiar again), finds herself covered in weird grape/berry goo….

Which we discover…..

the beasties…..

can’t…….

see through….

thus rendering her…..

completely camouflaged !!!

Oh mama! It’s absolutely shameless.

The promo also mentions The Descent which is kinda hilarious because; while there is a cave (the beastie’s lair), which our heroine (suitably goo covered and cammo’d) inexplicably decides to venture into. Although she never really seems more than thirty feet from the entrance, and spends a maximum of about ten minutes of screen time in there before realising the jig’s up and making a swift exit via a handy water passage (losing all her cammo-goo in the process). Ten minutes in a cave does not qualify the movie as being like The Descent – hilarious hyperbole!

The final showdown involves the obvious leader of the pack revealing himself and beating up on our girl a bit. He wears a very natty animal skull which he takes off in front of her (the filmmakers here just about resisting the temptation to do the full signature ‘Kevin Peter Hall’ two handed helmet removal), but still hugely Predator inspired. Once revealed, the big boss sort of looks like a steroid pumped, fur covered Rob Zombie (oh and has strangely familiar looking dreadlocks of course).

I won’t give away the outcome of this confrontation, suffice to say that it made me laugh and it wasn’t supposed to.

There’s an age old movie poster trick that’s been in existence since at least the 30s. The vast majority of movies have used it to one degree or another and I always imagine a typical early Hollywood marketing brainstorming session going something like this:

“Hey, how can we get more people to come see our movie?”

“We could put exciting stuff on the poster that isn’t in the movie”

“You’re a bloody genius, but isn’t that a tad dishonest?”

“Yes, but who cares once they’ve bought a ticket?

“You’re so right, let’s do it cha-chinggg!!”

So accepting that everyone has done this at every level of the business from King Kong to The Dark Knight; I guess it’s no surprise that the promo artwork and DVD sleeve for Primevil is quite misleading. I would contend that on low budget movies like this though; it is perhaps more significant, detrimental and disappointing than on an A list film.

The DVD sleeve and main menu screen clearly show lead actress Emily Foxler holding a large assault rifle, flanked by marine type dudes and sporting a natty pair of Lara Croft shorts complete with gun holsters and thigh straps. This obviously sets up a certain expectation with the audience of a gun toting, kick ass heroine leading a crack team of bad asses. However at no point in the film does Foxler wield anything more deadly than a machete or wear anything other than the fashionable long slacks she begins the movie in. As for the marine dudes; they are only in scenes unrelated to her and not significant anyway.

So these things aside (if that’s possible), I almost, nearly, kind of, just enjoyed occasionally some tiny…..small…..every now and then……no I can’t do it, there is so much going wrong in this movie and so little going right that I find it impossible to come up with anything to really recommend. The best I’ve got is that the two girls are attractive to look at (maybe not so much Foxler in her cammo-goo though ewwww!!)

That’s it. Everything else is either a laughable mess, a rip off or both.

Whether it’s dodgy ‘day for night’ scenes, terrible reverse angle continuity (my shirt is wet, my shirt is dry, my shirt is wet again), or super clunky dialogue like the following line (uttered after the friends realise a military camp they had found earlier in the movie has been mysteriously removed):

“They must have come back and left”

Awesome!

I also noticed at least one example of the filmmakers using the exact same actor footage twice in chronologically separate scenes. Reusing landscapes maybe, people doing things – no, very noticeable.

I’m not sure if this sort of thing is acceptable and commonplace at this end of the scale in 2011 or not, but it all serves to make Primevil a difficult movie to enjoy.

Strangely enough, it reminded me of some of the low budget genre flicks I would hire out as a teen based entirely on misleading video jackets or trailers on other movies. The difference here is that Primevil doesn’t compensate for its naffness with much in the way of cheap thrills like an 80s flick would. Neither of the girls get naked (gratuitously or otherwise), and neither do the boys for that matter. Plus it’s only a 15 certificate which means blood and gore is not free flowing either. So the two low budget staples of sex and extreme violence are sorely lacking in a movie that really could have used them.

Ben Pegley