Primal Force (1999)

"The island of the killer apes."

Plot

A rescue team attempts to reach a group of survivors whose plane crashed on a remote Mexican island. Unknown to them, the island is populated by genetically mutated baboons which have a thirst for blood.

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Review

A low budget TV movie which must have been primarily a vehicle for Ron Perlman to get some work before Hellboy came along, Primal Force does exactly what you'd expect a TV movie to do. It's got ambitions over and above its limited budget. It thinks it’s on a playing field well above its ability. And it pretends like you’ve never seen this material before in one shape or another. Well, we all know better, but it can’t be said that Primal Force doesn’t at least try. The film was part of the massive, unstoppable wave of genetically engineered creatures go bad flicks of the 1990s. After the cinematic supremacy of Jurassic Park, suddenly every studio executive and television network look at those astronomical box office numbers and just went into a total panic. The mandate was clear: we need monsters, we need genetic engineering and we need it yesterday. Audiences suddenly wanted biological tampering and the hubris of man throwing nature out of balance. They didn’t care about too much cutting-edge pseudoscience if the basics made sense.

Much better than the regurgitated dreck that the Sci-Fi Channel puts out nowadays, Primal Force’s trump card is in its main star. There's a great turn from Ron Perlman as the troubled, sceptical guide, Frank Brodie. He's the shining light amongst the generally poor cast but doesn't slum or phone it in. His gun-toting, baboon-blowing bad ass gives you a nice foresight into the qualities he would bring to the role of Hellboy a few years down the line. The character is a little cliché, complete with drinking problems and inner demons, but at least Perlman turns him into something more than a walking caricature. A lesser actor might lean into the caricature. They'll act visibly drunk, they'll stumble around, and they'll wink at the audience. But Perlman refuses to break the illusion, buying into the reality of the Mexican island and the killer baboons entirely. It's like he didn't even read the budget sheet before he walked on set. He grounds the clichés in actual palpable human weariness. When he raises his gun, the tension in his shoulders makes you believe his life is actually in danger. When he speaks his lines, he delivers them as a man who is genuinely haunted by his past, not as an actor just reading an action movie trope. Perlman shows the charm, the charisma and the wit that has turned him into a star so late in his career. As the late Christopher Lee once said about some of the films he starred in, “Every actor has to make terrible films from time to time, but the trick is never to be terrible in them.” If Ron Perlman takes the killer baboons seriously, you, sitting on your couch, suddenly feel obligated to take them seriously too. You must. He is single-handedly holding up the structural integrity of the entire narrative, which is critical

The same can’t be said for the rest of the cast who fulfil the necessary baboon fodder roles with aplomb. There’s the snobby rich girl, the sneaky businessman, etc. These are the sort of characters who can be identified either by the clothes they wear or the first few lines of dialogue that they spout. Best not get too acquainted with any of the minor characters once the baboons get to work. In a film like this, you simply do not have the screen time, the script quality, or the budget for deep, nuanced character development and the script can't do a deep dive into their psyche. The filmmakers need the audience to instantly know who to root for and who's going to get their face ripped off first. A business suit in a jungle equals arrogant, greedy, and highly expendable. Designer clothes equal out of touch and doomed. The stereotypes do all the heavy lifting. Richard Fancy, as said business suit, has one of those slimeball faces that you swear you'd seen a million times before in American TV shows or films, and given the nature of his filmography, you probably have seen him in guest roles in anything from Star Trek: Voyager, Lois and Clark: The New Adventures of Superman, Space: Above and Beyond, ER, Third Rock from the Sun, Diagnosis Murder, etc

The baboons don't look genetically mutated in any way, just bigger, more aggressive versions of normal baboons (which I kind of guess it what genetically mutated baboons would do!). When they attack the survivors, the film chops and cuts so quickly that you don't see much of them. It's a good thing in the long run because when they do get more screen time, you'll think you're watching National Geographic. But they’re not CGI creations but practical effects – performers in monkey suits! They are nicely created and well-performed, so much so that at times you would think they’re actual baboons. I think back to Shakma, a 1990 horror about scientists battling a baboon which has been experimented on with drugs, and remember how utterly terrifying the titular creature was and how the actors were afraid to be on set with it as it would become too aggressive, to realise that having more real baboons on a set would not be a good idea, even if you did have Ron Perlman on hand to keep them in line.

The baboons get shafted for a good portion of the film as the group reach an abandoned research lab and there is plenty of talking about how they’re going to get off the island. It all leads to a derivative ending which pretty much sums up the entire experience. However, whilst the promise of killer baboons doing some re-organisation work on the faces of these human survivors may sound appealing, the reality is that the violence is almost non-existent and the gore is minimal. You don’t really notice this however as there is enough going on and the film moves along at a reasonable pace. It seems that the editor at least understood the need to cover over the cracks by keeping the film brisk and masking the deficiencies of the baboons, flicking between close=up shots of them and reactions from the rest of the cast.

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Final Verdict

Primal Force will just go down as another poor ‘genetically engineered creatures go bad’ flick which became all the rage since Spielberg unleashed Jurassic Park upon the world. It’s watchable enough and you could certainly do a lot worse – and no doubt I will do many times in future. To date, I’ve literally only ever since it advertised once and that was on Sky many, many years ago. It’s never had a VHS/DVD/Blu-ray release, nor does it do the streaming rounds. It’s really disappointing as, whilst Primal Force, isn’t exactly a quality film, it’s certainly a solid B-movie which is far better than any of the dreadful films that The Asylum or Sy Fy spew out every year.

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Primal Force Director(s): Nelson McCormick Writer(s): Michael Thoma Actor(s): Ron Perlman, Mark Kiely, Roxana Zal, Kimberlee Peterson, Guillermo Ríos, Richard Fancy, Julian Sedgwick, Ramiro González Duration: 86 mins