MOVIE MUSIC UK

Original Review by Jonathan Broxton

The story behind the new fantasy adventure movie The Primevals is quite fascinating. In the late 1960s filmmaker David Allen set out to make a movie paying homage to his beloved Edgar Rice Burroughs adventure stories, and he originally envisaged a film about an unevolved Viking society that was threatened by a race of malevolent lizard-men. As the years went by Allen had to repeatedly abandon and return to the project, due to lack of funding and various other issues, until eventually he teamed with low-budget filmmaker Charles Band and his production company Full Moon Entertainment. Finally, in the summer of 1994, Allen shot his film – now entitled The Primevals – but he was unable to finish the complicated post-production due to yet more financial difficulties. Allen tinkered with the special effects for almost five years, but then in 1999 he died of cancer, and the unfinished film sat dormant for nearly two decades afterwards, despite Charles Band and Allen’s protégé Chris Endicott repeatedly trying to raise enough money to finish the film. Eventually, in 2018, an online crowdfunding campaign was successful, and the film was completed – although, even here, much of the final FX work was done by Allen’s former colleagues donating their time for free. The film finally premiered at the Fantasia Film Festival in Canada in July 2023, and is now being released to the wider public, almost 55 years since it was first put into production.

The film is an homage to the fantasy and science fiction ‘boy’s own’ adventures of the 1940s and 1950s, and is full of intentional references to the classic movies made by filmmakers like Ray Harryhausen. The film stars Richard Joseph Paul, Juliet Mills, Leon Russom, Walker Brandt, and Robert Cornthwaite, and follows a team of scientists who venture into a remote part of the Himalayas after the body of a mythical yeti is discovered intact. However, once they arrive, the group is shocked to discover a hidden primeval land populated by prehistoric creatures, ancient hominids, an alien reptilian species, and more yetis, and soon they are fighting for their lives to escape. I guess you could easily consider the film to be ‘so bad it’s good,’ but the filmmakers clearly had their hearts in the right place: the plot is clearly inspired by stories like The Land That Time Forgot, while the stop-motion monsters are tributes to classics like Jason and the Argonauts or The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad.

The score for The Primevals is by a composer who, in my opinion, is one of the great forgotten men of film music: Richard Band. As the younger brother of director/producer Charles Band he has scored almost all of his Full Moon Entertainment films, but what this has also meant is that Band has been mostly stuck writing music for low-budget science fiction and horror films since the early 1980s, whether for his brother, or for directors like Stuart Gordon and Brian Yuzna. While one or two of these films have become reasonably popular hits – Re-Animator (1985), From Beyond (1986), Dolls (1986), and Puppet Master (1989) among them – most of his filmography is for movies which can be charitably called ‘cult’ films, and what this also means is that Band’s music is, for the most part, little known outside this niche. This is a massive shame because, by and large, it’s excellent, over-achieving music in a way that composers like Robert Folk and, to a lesser extent, Christopher Young can appreciate.

Richard Band is an old-fashioned symphonic composer, a themes-and-variations man, with a penchant for expansive melodic ideas, creative horror dissonance, rousing action, and who is not afraid to clearly enunciate his film’s emotions through music. While prepping for this review I surprised myself when I realized that I have never reviewed a Richard Band score before, and I wanted to put this right by reviewing The Primevals and thereby, if people listen to it and like it, hopefully inspiring some people to investigate his earlier work.

In the album notes for the soundtrack release, Band says: “I’ve always been a firm believer in the importance of themes in film scoring and this score cried out for an epic theme perhaps in the classical manner of a Steiner, a Herrmann, a Rózsa, or perhaps even a Goldsmith, Williams, Jarre, or Shore. It was movies from my childhood like Lost Horizon and Jason and the Argonauts, as well as epics like Dr. Zhivago and Ben-Hur, that had the import I was searching for. This film was a true joy to score and well worth the roughly 20 odd years I waited to do it.”

While it would certainly be overstating things to say that the score for The Primevals has anywhere near the quality of a Ben-Hur or a Jason and the Argonauts, there is nevertheless a wonderfully nostalgic, throwback charm to the whole endeavor, one that fans of expansive and theme-filled adventure scores will appreciate enormously. The score is anchored by its rousing main theme, a tremendously open and expansive piece that feels like a cross between Trevor Jones’s Merlin and David Newman’s The Phantom, in that it encompasses the majestic vistas of the film’s cinematography, while underpinning it with a sense of excitement and rich, untapped potential. It first appears in the “Main Title” part of the opening cue, and it is never far away from the center of the score, receiving especially rousing statements in “The Expedition,” towards the end of “Rondo Agrees to the Expedition,” in the superb “Pushing On/Yeti Tracks,” and in several quick bursts during the score’s emphatic final action sequence.

Beyond this main theme, there are a number of excellent set pieces and action sequences worth highlighting. The opening “The Gale and Mountain Shack/Battling the Yeti” has some wonderfully bombastic and expressive dramatic scoring, including an action passage for swirling strings, clattering percussion, and whooping brass that sounds like early Basil Poledouris. Elsewhere in the same cue, this intensity is tempered with more introspective sequences that contain soothing new-agey woodwinds and pan-Asian textures that illustrate the film’s Himalayan setting.

There is scope and majesty and more than a hint of danger to the brass writing in “Unveiling the Yeti.” There’s a tender Goldsmith-esque relationship theme for strings and warm horns for “Matt and Dr. Collier,” which also comes back later in cues like “They Talk” and the spoilerific “Dr. Collier Dies”. The aforementioned “Rondo Agrees to the Expedition” contains some wonderfully moody suspense music, with special focus on high wavering flutes and sinister string passages.

The superb xylophone-heavy action music from the opening sequence returns in “Awakened by a Yeti/Kiku,” while the sense of wonder and sinister gravitas returns in “The Tower/Earthquake” and “The Spaceship/Inside the Spaceship,” both of which are among the few cues to prominently feature a choir. “The Cave/A New Land” introduces a majestic new theme for the ‘hidden world’ that the expedition discovers, and this is expanded superbly in the outstanding “Rafting Down the River,” which takes that theme and adds an exciting bed of Horner-esque brass triplets and dancing supportive string figures, to create a grand sense of buoyant adventure and optimism.

There is a more primal, percussive sound to the music for “The Hominid Village,” including some unusual electronic textures to further illustrate the alien-ness of the environment. Similarly, “Entering the Caves” contains some abstract metallic textures set against excellent, nervous-sounding orchestral dissonance, some of which appears to take inspiration from Jerry Goldsmith’s Planet of the Apes scores.

The finale of the score – from “The Abduction” through to the end of “The Yeti Helps the Escape Part 2/Matt Has a Plan” – is a wonderfully engaging 20+ minutes of rousing action, suspense, and light horror music, all underscoring the climactic battle between the human explorers, a live yeti, and a group of evil lizard-like aliens intent on keeping them all captive, and then having them fight to the death. Band’s action music has always been entertaining and intelligently conceived, but this is some of the best I have heard from him in what feels like decades. Sometimes the music is frantic and chaotic, a collision of orchestral and percussive forces. Sometimes the music is eerie and harshly abrasive, notably in cues such as “In the Cages” and “The Lizard Arena Show” when Band is depicting the evil lizard culture. Elsewhere, “Taken to the Arena” is full of powerful orchestral menace and portent, and “The Yeti is Released” is a superb col legno march that has a real sense of scale and simmering tension.

There is so much going on in “Escaping the Cages/The Yeti Helps the Escape Part 1,” from the insistent march-like pulses to the clattering xylophones to the increasingly flamboyant orchestral passages, and then as it all grows and comes to a head in “The Yeti Helps the Escape Part 2/Matt Has a Plan,” the impact is tremendous. As I said, this is honestly some of the most impressive music I have heard from Band in decades – some of the brass writing here is especially spectacular. The “End Titles” cue then features full reprises of the main theme and the “Rafting Down the River” theme, ending the score on a real high.

One thing that’s perhaps worth noting is the apparent difference between certain cues in terms of the orchestral ensemble. Many cues were clearly recorded with a large, real symphony orchestra, and sound rich and lush, whereas other cues clearly sound as though they were created with samplers and synthetic instruments after the fact; it’s possible that this was done for budgetary reasons, or because they were recorded at different times, but I don’t know the ins and outs of all this. However, the discrepancy here is very obvious, and some may find the transition between the two ‘sounds’ jarring and potentially off-putting. I also worry that younger listeners may find the whole thing ‘cheesy’ and ‘old fashioned’ compared with the more aggressively modern sound that tends to accompany genre films these days – but that’s really the point of the whole thing. This is a throwback to a less complicated time, when plasticine lizards and stop-motion yeti were the height of special effects sophistication.

Those small issues aside, everything else about The Primevals gets an unhesitating recommendation. Fans of classic 1970s and 80s fantasy and sci-fi scoring will find it to be almost directly tailored to their taste, and fans of Trevor Jones, Basil Poledouris, James Horner, and Jerry Goldsmith especially will glean a great deal of satisfaction from Band’s loving homages to that sound. Of course, it’s pastiche, and intentionally so, but Band does it with such care that it’s almost impossible not to be impressed with it. I also hope that this score encourages people to investigate Richard Band’s earlier works, because he has written some tremendous scores for little-known films, and he deserves more attention than he receives.

Buy the Primevals soundtrack from the Movie Music UK Store

Track Listing:

• The Gale and Mountain Shack/Battling the Yeti/Main Title (7:23)
• Dr. Collier’s Announcement (1:05)
• Unveiling the Yeti (1:19)
• Matt and Dr. Collier (1:32)
• They Talk/The Expedition (5:28)
• Rondo Agrees to the Expedition (3:02)
• Meeting Cathleen/Kiku (1:02)
• Pushing On/Yeti Tracks (1:35)
• Awakened by a Yeti/Kiku (1:34)
• The Tower/Earthquake (2:08)
• The Cave/A New Land (2:35)
• Rafting Down the River (1:55)
• The Hominid Village (1:05)
• Matt Hears Villagers Screaming (0:54)
• The Hominid Confrontation (1:06)
• The Wrecked Village/Onwards (2:27)
• Entering the Caves (1:33)
• Huge Spaceship Discovery (1:46)
• The Spaceship/Inside the Spaceship (4:08)
• The Abduction (1:21)
• In the Cages (2:26)
• Taken to the Arena (2:43)
• The Lizard Arena Show (1:54)
• The Yeti is Released (3:01)
• Escaping the Cages/The Yeti Helps the Escape Part 1 (5:01)
• The Yeti Helps the Escape Part 2/Matt Has a Plan (5:53)
• Dr. Collier Dies & Finale (3:46)
• End Titles (3:05)

Running Time: 72 minutes 47 seconds

Silva Screen SILCD-1745 (2024)

Music composed and conducted by Richard Band. Orchestrations by Kostas Christides and Dimitris Marinakis. Recorded and mixed by XXXX. Edited by XXXX. Album produced by Richard Band.