Movie Review Primeval

Primeval (2007) 

Directed by Michael Katleman

Written by John Brancato, Michael Ferris 

Starring Dominic Purcell, Orlando Jones, Brooke Langton, Jurgen Prochnow 

Release Date January 12th, 2006 

Published January 14th, 2006 

The all consuming maw of the movie release biz requires constant new releases to fill the void. Thus, movies that once would have gone directly to the video stores are making their way to theaters. That is no doubt how a movie as dopey and star free as Primeval managed a wide theatrical release. This goofball giant gator flick has the budget, cast, and effects of a direct to DVD feature and yet took up residence on more than one thousand screens recently.

In the wilds of Africa there is a killer more deadly than even the government versus revolutionary violence that dominates much of the continent. This killer has taken thousands of lives and eluded capture and death with great ease. The killer is an ancient creature, a giant alligator that strikes with the quickness of a cat and the killing power of the shark from Jaws.

In New York one of the world's leading investigative reporters Tim Manfrey (Dominic Purcell) has been assigned to investigate the giant gator in Africa. With his cameraman Steven (Orlando Jones) and a tagalong reporter, Aviva (Brooke Langton) whose specialty is animal stories, Tim will accompany a scientist, Matthew Collins (Gideon Emery) who claims that he can capture the giant gator without harming it.

Leading the expedition into the wild is a grizzled international travel guide named Jacob Krieg (Jurgen Prochnow). Krieg claims that he has seen the giant gator and that it killed his wife. Needless to say, Jacob is a proponent of pouring buckets of bullets and dynamite on the giant gator until its pieces are roasting over an open fire.

You can skip ahead in this plot without much effort. Predicting that we will have a showdown between the animal loving scientist and the great white hunter or that the animal loving scientist will be a whiny wuss about it, is not much of a stretch of your mental muscles. In fact, nothing in Primeval is likely to challenge the intellect, something I'm sure producers would tout.

Primeval is an odd project choice for director Michael Katleman. A TV veteran, Mr Cattleman's best work has been on shows like Gilmore Girls, Everwood and Dawson's Creek. Not exactly the resume of a guy working on a giant alligator movie. That resume may explain why the action of Primeval is awkward to the point of laughable and the special effects are pitched at the level between Ed Wood and classic Star Trek.

Orlando Jones continues to be movie poison. How he continues to find work in feature films after a career that includes roles in The Replacements, Double Take, Say It Isn't So, and The Time Machine, is one of the great mysteries of Hollywood. I'm sure Jones has some kind of talent but when it comes to feature films he seems to seek out the absolute worst material and manages to somehow make it worse. His role in Primeval borders on racist caricature.

Jurgen Prochnow is not exactly the kind of movie poison that Orlando Jones is, though his casting has a similar effect of signaling bad material. The difference is that Prochnow has become such a bad actor that he brings a certain level of camp to his roles. Check him out in the video game movie House of the Dead where he pitches his performance perfectly to director Uwe Boll's level of talent. Prochnow could be Boll's muse.

It's the new movie business paradigm, feed the beast. The beast is the week to week call for new products to populate the hundreds of thousands of movie screens in multiplexes across the country. This new paradigm guarantees that movies like Primeval that you would have wandered past in video stores just five years ago will now pop up on the big screen, feeding the unending crave for new products.