Last year I wrote about the Puppet Master series, the brainchild of indie filmmaker Charles Band.  Band’s Full Moon Entertainment for years produced schlocky, low-budget, but entertaining films that heavily featured miniatures and stop-motion animation.  Like many small filmmakers, Band’s company kept budgets low by reusing models and footage in different films, often creating scripts (a la Roger Corman) to fit the props and sets already on-hand.

The guys over at RedLetterMedia did two long episodes on the Puppet Master franchise, and got into some of the details of Band’s approach to filmmaking in those videos:

They did a third video that continued to look at Band’s use of stop-motion techniques and puppetry:

If you’re not enticed at the thought of watching three lengthy videos to understand Band’s films, no worries; suffice it to say that Band was never one to let good (or bad) footage go to waste.

So come—at last!—to today’s film, the first review of 2025:  The Primevals (2024).

The film looks like it was filmed in the 1990s, and it was:  most of the film was shot in 1994.  The film’s longtime writer and director, David Allen, passed in 1999, with the film still unfinished.  Band started an IndieGoGo fundraiser that raised $40,000 in this century, allowing for the film to be completed and released in 2024 (it premiered at a film festival in 2023).

But the film’s history goes back even further.  It started as a pitch reel called Raiders of the Stone Ring (1968) in the late 1960s.  The project bounced around in production limbo for decades, before Band’s Full Moon Entertainment began producing the film.  Band himself has acknowledged that he will probably never recoup his expenses on the film, which reportedly cost millions of dollars ($4 million seems to be the most frequently-cited figure) to make.  It’s a labor of love to honor David Allen, and it certainly comes across as a fitting tribute.

Because the film was made across the span of fifty-five years, it possesses a wild blending of styles from different decades.  The stop-motion puppets feel like products of the 1960s (a plus for yours portly); seeing the stills from Raiders of the Stone Ring, then seeing stills from The Primevals, it is fascinating seeing the same lizard men figures at different periods in the history of cinematography.

The film itself is a typical Charles Band/Full Moon Entertainment affair:  bad acting, cheap sets, cheesy background music, etc.  It is a B-film, and it doesn’t pretend to be anything different.  The acting is really bad at times, but that’s not why you watch a flick like this one, anyway.  You watch it for the wild plot involving the Yeti and a race of gene-manipulating aliens living in a Shangri-La-esque primordial valley in the Himalayan Mountains.

I loved these kinds of flicks as a kid, and I still love the sense of rollicking adventure that The Primevals puts onto full display.  It’s a globetrotting adventure that smacks of a low-budget Indiana Jones flick (the crew of scientists traveling to capture a live Yeti hire a big game hunter named “Rondo Montana,” if that gives you any indication of the flick’s influences), which is fitting:  all those Indy flicks were themselves the product of movie theatre action serials from the 1930s.

Is The Primevals a good movie?  Not particularly.  Is it a fun, woke-free distraction?  Absolutely.  If you love stop-motion animation (I do) and the idea of paying homage to a stop-motion director who spent literal decades trying to get this picture finished (I do love that, too), then The Primevals is a fun oddity, and well-worth watching.