Primal Review (2011)

A group of friends go on a remote camping trip to study ancient rock paintings. But their pleasurable experience takes a quick turn for the worse when Mel becomes very sick and feverish after skinny-dipping in a nearby waterhole. It doesn’t take long before her sickness turns into something much worse. Mel rapidly regresses to a primal state of being, and the others must try to survive as Mel hunts them down. Will any of them survive before they find out what the rock paintings were really saying? Or will they become prey to something more savage?

I’m going to preface this by saying that I had read a couple reviews that made Primal seem like it was going to be a pretty sweet movie. However after viewing it, I have to say that I feel cheated as I’m struggling to find any redeemable qualities about this movie.

Part of me feels like I should cut Josh Reed some slack, as this was his first feature length film and he had some good ideas; however I just don’t feel like he executed any of them very well. One of my biggest problems with this movie (and many other movies for that matter) was its lack of character development, or even characters for that matter. Even after an hour and a half, I still don’t really know anything about any of the characters and would have a hard trying to describe any of them. Watching a movie without any relatable, likeable, or developed characters makes it hard to connect or feel any kind of emotion towards anyone; and as such, this movie fell very flat and went nowhere fast.

Once I got past this, I turned my brain off and hoped that I would at least get some awesome blood and gore scenes to satiate my appetite.  While there were two pretty cool kills at the very end of the movie, it was definitely not worth the hour and fifteen-minute wait to get there. The fight scenes were laughable at best, as was CGI (though very little of it was used). I also feel like shooting on location in Australia was a wasted opportunity as well. The camera never really used its surroundings to its advantage and could have easily been shot in the woods behind my house.
In short, I feel like a decent premise wasn’t enough to make this movie worthwhile.

Lack of characters, blood/gore (the trailer is misleading), story, or anything to really sink your teeth into make this one not worth the time for me. - 3.5/10