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THE PRIMEVALS – Richard Band
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. Read more…
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