Primal Force (1999)

This Movie Can Only Be Described With One Word.

Lack of good storyline.

Better Late Then Never

There are moments that feel comical, some horrific, and some downright inspiring but the tonal shifts hardly matter as the end results come to a film that's perfect for this time.

Primal Force is a terrible movie but it's one of those ones that's so bad you actually enjoy it. Now, Ron Pearlman is a fine actor but this film probably isn't one of his proudest moments.It is hilarious at times. The 'mad scientist' giving his speech is unbearably funny and the psychopathic mutant baboons will make you wet yourself (not with fear, of course). When you're not dying of laughter, you'll be marvelling at just how bad this films is.It is awful but I recommend it just because it's so much fun to watch a great 'bad' movie sometimes. If you're not up for Kurosawa or Tarkovsky, some beer, a few friends and Primal Force are a great way to spend an evening.

The made for TV film Primal Force begins with Frank Brodie (Ron Pearlman) waking up from a recurring nightmare about his mate being killed by some Baboons. There is a knock on Frank's door, he answers it & standing before him is a guy named Scott Davis (Mark Kiely) who has been told that he knows San Miguel Island better than anyone else & that he needs his help to lead a rescue mission as a plane recently crashed there. Eventually Brodie agrees, together with a female medic named Tara Matthews (Roxana Zal) a computer guy named Stan Kovacs (Julian Sedgwick) & Eddie Mendoza (Guillermo Rios) who carries a gun, gets in the way & does very little else, they set off for San Miguel Island. Meanwhile on the Island itself the three survivors, the pilot (Jimy Hefner), a real estate guy named Deutsch (Richard Fancy) & a pretty young girl named Kelsey Cunningham (Kimberlee Peterson) whose Father is interested in buying the Island, are deciding what to do when a group of vicious genetically altered Baboons kill the pilot. Kelsey & Deutsch just sort of run away. Our heavily armed group of rescuers, lead by Brodie, arrive on the Island via boat. Scott feels Brodie is withholding some information but they troop on regardless of all the human & animal skulls they find. They find Kelsey & Deutsch but they are all attacked by the genetic Baboons. The Baboons now know they're on the Island & will stop at nothing to kill the intruders as Brodie has to use his experience & firepower to keep everyone alive, with varying degrees of success. If that wasn't enough the guy (Bruno Danza) driving the boat has buggered off leaving them stranded & the Baboons have killed Kovacs & destroyed the radio equipment. As the survivors run low on ammo & morale they decide to fight back against the Baboons!Directed by Nelson McCormick I thought Primal Force was an OK time waster but nothing that overly impressed me. The script by Micheal Thoma is about as clichéd as you expect of this sort of low budget TV production. First the characters, there's the moody, unshaven hero with personal demons to exorcise but turns out be be a throughly decent chap in the end, the clean cut hero, the computer whizz, the tough female character, the token nobody who is there to die & nothing else just so something happens & the character who has other more mysterious motives for being on the Island. The innocent plane crash victims aren't any better with the young pretty girl who screams a lot & the annoying selfish fat guy who doesn't care about anyone but himself. Then there's the story, a group becomes stranded in an isolated location & can't call for help, sound familiar? Group encounter living threat that wants to kill them all for no real reason at all, group run low on ammo even though they never actually run out & have to come up with other ways to defeat their enemy in a nail-biting (not) climax, been done yeah? Genetic experiments gone wrong. One character who gets abducted by the enemy & is not killed for some unexplained reason unlike everyone else who are killed on sight. You probably get the message. Having said all that for what it is I thought Primal Force was OK & rolled out the clichés with a certain degree of entertainment value. Ron Pearlman as the muscle bound, wise cracking Brodie is great & almost makes Primal Force worth watching on his own, everyone else is utterly forgettable. Unfortunately one area where Primal Force loses a couple of stars is in the violence department, basically it hasn't got any. This was obviously made with a fairly young teenage audience in mind as the blood, gore & nastiness is kept to an absolute minimum. The killer Baboons are just people in monkey suits, nothing particularly spectacular. Technically Primal Force is OK, it's very MTV in style with quick cuts, jerky hand held camera movements during the attacks, slow motion, bleached colours & every other flashy pointless trick you can think of. On the plus side the Mexican locations on occasion look stunning & a few nice shots here & there captures it well. Overall Primal Force isn't particularly good, but it ain't particularly bad either just sort of average & I think a decent helping of blood & gore would have helped no end to improve it!

This is about the survivors of a plane crash and the rescuers who come to escort them back to safety. They crash on an island that is inhabited by killer baboons, and Perlman's character is your stock cliché who knows the secret of the island, is haunted by the memories, drinks a lot, but puts on a courageous show in combating his fears, blah blah blah. The only other character worthy of note is the spoiled little rich girl who survived the plane crash. She could have almost carried the movie if there had been perhaps one more interesting character for her to interact with, but there wasn't. There's also a doctor who says the most spectacularly stupid thing in the whole movie. After finding the crash survivors, and needing to get off the island as quickly as possible to escape the baboons, she states that the survivors are in no condition to travel. Um, lady, the survivors just spent all day hiking around the island. Are they too tired now? It's the sort of stupidity that almost makes you yell at your TV set.The story wasn't bad overall, but the fact that the characters were so uninteresting and not really sympathetic left me not really caring.

I watched this movie just because of Ron Perlman but I liked it not only because of his brilliant play. Hard to find a good sci-fi movie but this is the one! This is horror movie that has a plot which is a rare case. I mean, some movies of this type show you only scary scenes, without any explanations what characters feel and other stuff. "Primal force" is a nice thing.