#the primevals gif | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

whatyourusherthinks · 1 month ago

Text

The Movies My Theater Missed Review

So. This is the end. Yeah, sorry to cut this blog short, but real life events have changed circumstances in my life and I no long have a job that allows me to watch free movies. I was going to wait and do like eight movies on this list, but I think for my own sanity I'm just going to quick talk about the movies I already watched, then do a top ten best and worst movies I watched this year, then bid adieu. Will this blog become resurrected? I dunno, doubtful unless I get another movie theater job. But for now, lets look at three Movies I totally dug which didn't come out in the theater I was working at.

The Primevals

The Primevals is a retro-styled science fiction adventure movie that is brought to us by Full Moon Features. Now, that alone makes me interested in the movie already. I like sci-fi, I like old school adventure movies, and I like monsters. The story is very straightforward, some scientist gain access to a dead yeti, find some weird stuff dissecting it, and travel to Nepal in order to see if they can find a live Yeti to study. It's got cool stop motion effects, enjoyable characters, and really fricking good music! I really want to emphasize that the effects are spectacular. Not only do they blend surprisingly well with the live action backgrounds, model sets, and real actors, but they are damn impressive. The amount of emotion that the yetis express in the movie is so good. My only real complaint is that finale feels a little low-key for all the build up, but that probably because of budget reasons. Stop motion is already hard, so while having hordes of lizardmen attack a giant ape sounds awesome, only the big corporation filmmakers are gonna have that kind of money and those guys will just make you do it with CGI to be cost effective or to meet a deadline.

But the reason it's on this list in particular is for a deeper reason. I first heard The Primevals is because some of the film people I watch on YouTube were talking about it. And the reason they were talking about this film was because of David Allen. David Allen was an animator, working with stop motion to create creatures for a variety of Full Moon Features and other low budget sci-fi and horror movies. (A particular favorite of mine is Doctor Mordred. That mammoth/t-rex fossil fight was awesome.) He died in 1999. Before he died, David was working on a movie, his movie. A movie that was entirely his vision, making the effects he wanted to see in a story he wanted to tell, the way he wanted to do it. That movie got lost in production hell, stopping and starting over and over as David couldn't find a production company that would float the bill. He worked on this move for 40 years! It was set to come out in 1994! But after his death, Full Moon Features had to shelve it. Until 2018.

In 2018 Full Moon Features ran an Indiegogo campaign to finish David Allen's movie. That movie was the Primevals. This passion project from a guy who was pretty much only a draw if you were in the know and often had a lot of his hard work cut out of movies he worked on. Will this movie be for everyone? No. The old-school adventure set-up of white people exploring distant exotic lands to fight monsters has always been burdened with racist undertones and the plot may brush up a little too closely to ancient aliens conspiracies for some. (Although the movie actually has the story address both points and particularly the ancient alien thing gets cleverly subverted.) But this is a passion project by people with their hearts in the right place and a lost film finally released. This feels like a movie everyone owes it to themselves to check out.

Salem's Lot (2024)

I watched this one on the recommendation of my friends (Hi Chuck! Hi Mary!) and I wasn't really sure what to expect from this. I've gone on record saying I don't really like vampires, and I have absolutely no opinion of Stephen King. Never read any of his books, and the only King movie I've seen is Creepshow, which feels more like a George A. Romero product than a Stephen King one. And I don't know if I could have had a better introduction. Salem's Lot (2024) is awesome! It's more or less a traditional vampire story but with old Hollywood epic vibes. It's not just a vampire terrorizing a small town, we need to hire like 100 extras and need 30 characters in the plot so we can turn half of them into vampires! The movie sticks with some traditional vampire lore which makes the plot somewhat easy to predict, but the way it's implemented is so cool. The special effects in this movies are simply delightful. Especially the crosses, the way they glow makes it seem like they'd burn off the film if it was actually shot when Hollywood made epics. And their is a scene where the main vampire is sucking someone's blood and his head get's all these thick red veins bursting out of his skull, ugh it looked so fucking awesome! It isn't a perfect movie, the sacrifice of having a town full of vampires is that there are way too many characters in the front half of the movie and some of the plot threads lead nowhere. Plus if you could totally predict the plot if you know vampire fiction and ESPECIALLY if you know Stephen King. But hey, it's damn good. I wish it came to theaters instead of being a Max exclusive.

Hundreds of Beavers

Oh hell yes! This was pretty much the reason I wanted to make this end of the year long review. I was sent the trailer for this movie by my dad, and I was so hyped immediately. Unfortunately, it was an incredibly limited release. The closest theaters that were showing it was 80 miles away and I don't own a car, so even though I totally would have paid to go see this movie, I couldn't. And it was only streaming on Apple TV, I'm not getting another subscription service.

Hundreds of Beavers is a live action black and white cartoon. And it's fucking amazing. It's about a washed up Apple Jack seller who is trying to survive the winter and earn the hand of a fur trader's daughter by giving him the pelts of, well, hundreds of beavers. This entire plot is just a collection of slapstick and silly scenarios. There is no dialogue, all the characters mostly speak in grunts and screams, and all the animals are people in mascot costumes. They use bluescreen and simple animations that looks so bad they come around to being stylish. The plot is just a sequence of trapper finds something new, the new thing causes him a misfortune, the trapper learns how to use it to assist in his hunting, and someone gets tackled or kicked in the face. It's sounds dumb, but it's actually really smart! I don't want to get too much into it because that would require spoilers and you should just watch the movie yourself, but there's about half the movie I thought was gonna be just joke fodder and then it was called back or important to the plot. And despite there is practically no dialogue in the movie, the humans are all distinct characters and there's a pretty awesome plot twist. The plot about a guy killing people in beaver costumes? Yes. It's one of the greatest movies I've ever seen. Has it beaten The Fall Guy for my favorite movie of the year? No, not quite. It's not as rewatchable as that movie and the romance in The Fall Guy was better. But Hundreds of Beavers is still an easy recommendation.

#The Primevals #Salem's Lot (2024)#Hundreds of Beavers #Recommended Movies

0 notes

randomdeinonychus · 2 years ago

Photo

I am so excited for this one.