Primeval
Starring: Dominic Purcell, Brooke Langton, Orlando Jones, Jürgen Prochnow, Gideon EmeryDirector: Michael Katleman
Studio: Buena Vista Home Entertainment
MPAA Rating: R (Restricted)
Format: AC-3, Color, Dolby, Dubbed, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
Running Time: 94 minutes
DVD Release: June 12th 2007
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DVD Review
Who would have thought that Primeval, a movie about a giant man-eating crocodile, would turn out to be closer in spirit to Hotel Rwanda and Blood Diamond than to the average slasher-movie horror flick? Perhaps it doesn't aim at the social-issue heights of those more prestigious films, and the acting is uneven to say the least, but give this monster movie credit for trying to get in the smart, edgy vein of some of John Sayles's early scripts for Roger Corman. A cable-TV news crew travels to Burundi to capture footage of (and, if possible, just plain capture) the enormous crocodile that's been terrorizing the local landscape. Making things more complicated: the local landscape is also being terrorized by a civil war. The film does a clever job of weaving the two scourges together, and the script by John Brancato and Michael Ferris pays surprisingly explicit attention to the way the West has been slow to acknowledge human-rights disasters in Africa, calling out Rwanda and Darfur by name. Now if only the characters were more than cardboard-thin; only Orlando Jones, doing the standard-issue wisecracking black sidekick, makes any particular impression. (Poor Jurgen Prochnow, glowering about in the Great White Hunter role--you'd think the guy who commanded Das Boot could knock off a giant reptile, no problem.) Pedestrian direction doesn't bring the human element to life, but give it up for a fine crocodile--his name is Gustave--who exists in a nifty, hungry computer-generated frenzy for most of his performance. And the script even provides Gustave some behavioral motivation that recalls the it's-not-their-fault-it's-man's-fault spirit of 1950s monster movies. Not a bad effort at all. --Robert Horton
User Reviews
Eating children is a GOOD thing... - Rating: 4/5
I was very pleased to get my daily dose of GIANT CROCODILE. You simply cannot get enough of THAT. News team travels to Africa to capture the largest known crocodile in the world. GIANT CROCODILE has plans of its own, mainly to eat everything in sight. Complicating matters is the fact the team is caught in the middle of a civil war between rebel factions shooting everyone in sight. A better horror film than Lake Placid, which really didn't have ANY good GIANT CROCODILE attacks, this movie builds suspense while also giving you plenty of GIANT CROCODILE action. Now if someone could satisfy my need for GIANT SQUID...
"THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND", by way of "LAKE PLACID" - Rating: 3/5
The title of my review says it all; this is a movie which boldly attempts to mix the strife-torn drama of African unrest with a giant crocodile movie. With mixed results.
The crocodile (named 'Gustave', of all things) looks pretty rad, for a CGI beastie. The acting is fine, and I'm beginning to view star Dominic Purcell (who plays a shallow TV reporter that unsurprisingly finds his inner hero by the end of the flick) as a very dependable, likable leading man. A bit of genuine amusement is afforded by his interactions with co-star Orlando Jones, though the typical romantic tension he shares with leading lady Brooke Langton is predictable and forced. Straight-to-video king Jurgen Prochnow is wasted here (and somewhat under-written) as the grizzled, Captain Ahab-like croc-stalker.
Aside from it being a monster movie, which I'm ALWAYS up for, the best thing about "PRIMEVAL" is the fact that it is played to utter seriousness. The background of the story is a dark and grim place, where tribal in-fighting produces an impoverished, atrocity-filled atmosphere of brutality and callous murder. This is the perfect setting for a monster film, and the style in which this movie is shot conveys the aura well.
Biggest disappointment? "PRIMEVAL" (supposedly based on true accounts) takes the cheap way out and has 'Gustave' conveniently showing up at the most inopportune time for the bad guys, and his massive scaly butt intervenes more than once to chomp down on a villain or two just as the heroes of the story are at their most endangered.
*sigh*... uh, yeah. whatever.
But I liked it overall, since I'm a huge fan of killer crocodile/alligator flicks, and "PRIMEVAL" is certainly better than the average rampaging-reptile fare that you find on late-nite cable. Probably not for everyone, but hey, let's face it -- if you're the kind of person who's looking specifically for a giant crocodile movie, how picky can you really be?!
"Jaws"+"King Kong"+"Hotel Rwanda"+"Broadcast News"+"Lake Placid"="Primeval - Rating: 3/5
"Primeval" is another one of those movies where you can have fun working out the movie equation where you name the films that were cannibalized to come up with the formula for this one. What if "Jaws" came out of the water? Okay, yes, you would have one scene in "Deep Blue Sea," but you would also have "Primeval." The nature guy in this film even claims it is the crocodile that is the most perfect killing machine on each, so take that, Matt Hooper. What if the expedition in "King Kong" was really trying to bring back a giant crocodile alive? You would also have "Primeval." What if you sent a news crew concerned with ratings like in "Broadcast News"? What if you use a goat for bait just like in "Jurassic Park"? What if you just took "Lake Placid" and moved it to Africa so that you can play it against the backdrop of civil war like in "Hotel Rwanda?" Add up all of these films and what you get is "Primeval." Do not be surprised as you watch this movie that time and time again you mind wanders to those other, much better films. Even the characters in this one acknowledge they are trapped in "Jaws," although they are way off base on the "Godzilla" analogy and I must note with pleasure that the natives are not willing to start singing a song in English like they did in "Congo."
The opening scene is somewhat interesting. A United Nations group is checking out what they think is another mass grave in Africa when it turns out to be something different namely a giant killer crocodile named Gustave (Really. He is supposedly still out there dinning up and down the Rusizi River that is his home: this film is inspired by true events as opposed to being a true story). This 2007 film is ill-served by the gaudy post-modern opening credits because the whole point is that somewhere out there is a real monster eating hundreds of people and this looks like it is setting up "Se7en" or something grittier like "Hostel."
Using the "Jaws" typology, news producer Tim Manfrey (Dominic Purcell) is the Chief Brody character who does not want to be there when he is sent to Africa to bring the monster back alive, Mathew Collins (Gideon Emery) is the Matt Hooper science geek with the gadgets, and Jacob Krieg (Jurgen Prochnow) is the Quint character who everybody should be listening to before people start dying. Instead of town fathers concerned about taking the "summer dinks" for everything they can on the 4th of July, we have soldiers going around lopping off heads and killing civilians for essentially the same reason. Where Manfrey is different is that he brings his romantic interest, Aviva Masters (Brooke Langton) along for the ride, and has a wisecracking cameraman, Steven Johnson (Orlando Jones) who always has something to say on every subject from halitosis to Darfur. But you worry about him because the funny guy is usually one of the first to go in a monster movie.
There is an interesting sub-text to this film that would have been well worth exploring, because Gustav has eaten literally hundreds of natives and it is not until a white woman become the entree that the "world" takes an interest and decides to go do something about it. But instead the film puts the characters between a rock, in the form of the giant croc, and a hard place, namely the Brundi-Rhwandi border, where every thug has a gun. The dynamic is that if you are worried about the croc, the guys with the guns show up, and when things get ugly with the thugs, expect Gustave to save the day. To put it another way, every time you forget the other half of the movie, it comes back into play. Eventually the idea of capturing Gustave is forgotten as the survivors try to avoid both the croc and the thugs, and I swear I was going to round up on this film until Manfrey articulates a link between the genocide and the monster that might be true, but ironically made it all seem unreal just because it was given such dramatic weight it capsized the moment. The ending is fairly predictable once you understand the three sides involved, but let us not pretend that the irony is a divine solution to the situation.
The movie was filmed in South Africa and all I can say is that things sure have changed since John Huston took Humphrey Bogart and Katharine Hepburn to Africa to shoot "The African Queen." You travel thousands of miles to make THIS movie? I did think that drirector Michael Katleman and especially film editor Gabriel Wrye did above average work here, much better than I would have expected and probably better than the production deserved. However, ultimately, there simply is not enough of the croc in this film and when it does show up the special effects are not up to the challenge. I just watched "Jaws" again earlier this week and, yes, the shark is suggested rather than seen for the first half of the film, but once we finally see Bruce he is an integral part of the action. For me the special effects are problematic because Gustave moves so damn fast, in or out of the water, that I have trouble buying it. After all, this is supposed to be the biggest croc in the world. The lower your expectations, the more you can enjoy watching "Primeval," and it really is a beter "Jaws" rip-off than all of the actual "Jaws" sequeles combined.
The actual story is more intriguing than this mediocre film - Rating: 2/5
Despite being based on a "true story", primeval is still a story that kind of gets pulled down by the production, marketing and DVD cover of a B-grade horror flick. Although the story is somewhat interesting, the CG crocodile and the somewhat hokey dialogue and overall production are lacking for this film to be taken too seriously. I found the special features section that covered the actual case of the story much more compelling than the fictional counterpart that was trying to represent it.
Primeval is based on a large crocodile that is sometimes referred to as a "man eating" crocodile. I wasn't aware that some crocodiles were man eating and some are not, and although I am no expert in the field I would assume that if one is hungry enough and finds something edible in the water, it is probably going to eat it without a second thought of whether that dinner is accompanied by a Rolex and cell phone or not. The film does have some familiar faces from other corners of films and TV with the screen presence of Orlando Jones, Brook Langton and Dominic Purcell. After an initial introduction of a separate incident involving the croc, the movie gets rolling into the main course of our main characters playing a team of people with varying skill sets in journalism and crocodile hunting being assembled to travel to Africa to capture the crocodile. Throw in some corruptive baddies who carry AK-47 rifles and the back-story of genocide and you have a good plot that involves two major ongoing subjects who both have carnage as the end result.
Orlando Jones character is perhaps the most intriguing, and his compassion for an orphaned boy does add some good sentiment within the main storyline. Although promising given the background of facts this story was based upon, I found it overall to be marketed too much as a film that falls along the lines of a "Lake Placid" or perhaps "Anaconda". At times I found the set production to be lacking some basic elements although it was being filmed on location in Africa. Despite our team of characters being exposed to Searing heat and swampy water, they are rarely shown drinking water or sweating profusely. One particular scene that struck me as odd was after an attack at a boat house with an adjoining dock in which it gets mauled to splinters by the crocodile. The following morning the team is shown laying out on the remnants of this facility in the sun trying to figure out what the next plan of attack is, since the croc (monitored electronically by now) is out in the grass somewhere near shore. Everyone is relatively calm and even joking somewhat, with nary a scratch on them despite surviving a collapsing wooden structure. Aviva Masters (played by Langton) even seems to have makeup on and looks more like a girl who just walked through a park, including hair that isn't the slightest out of place. I know it may seem like I am nitpicking here, but if you are going to show people in the wild, at least make it somewhat believable with some dirt on their face and sweat soaked clothes for a little more believability.
The chase scenes of the team trying to escape and deal with the armed militants who are caught up in a civil war are done well, and I found the particular use of camera angles and slow motion of Steven Johnson (played by Jones) making a valiant attempt at escaping the croc towards the end very haunting. Overall the director did not do a bad job of mixing in the civil war strife with the nuisance of the giant crocodile, but in the end it is not something that would be regarded as a keeper in my own collection, perhaps good to rent if you have nothing else of interest on the shelf. I try to judge a film like this for what it is, and not what it is not when it comes to lower budgets and such. The main issue is that despite the actual stories that come from Africa, this film is a combination of "shock and awe" CG tactics and mediocre fictional storytelling.
Where is the Crocodile Hunter when you Need him? - Rating: 2/5
Seriously, this movie is really not good. If you want a great Crocodile movie, go see "Lake Placid". Better actors, much better acting, and a more realistic crocodile... but not by much!
People have gone over the plot, so I will not rehash it here.
The plot is not very good as it intermixes the horror Crocodile and the African political storylines. And as with most bad horror movies, stupid decisions are made at times that wind up killing the actors.
Jurgen Prochnow's talents are wasted in this film as the big-game hunter who is supposed to help the film crew. Dominic Purcell once again proves he has no acting talent. I wish they would kill him off on "Prison Break". The only talent here is Orlando Jones. He does a relatively good job, but we do not even see him being killed. He just pops up dead later on.. What a waste!
The bonus features on the DVD are thin. There is one "deleted" scene that is pretty amusing, where they show a scene on how the Warlord was supposedly to be killed originally. The "Making of" is not very interesting.
I did give the movie 2 stars, because it did keep me watching for 90 minutes.
