A rather dissapointing offering ‘Primitives’ (also known as ‘Savage Terror’) is a film that is probably best talked about in the knowledge that the director gave an interview shortly after this film premiered where, when asked what made him decide to make a ‘cannibal’ movie?, he responded by saying that he’d watched a bunch of them over a brief window of time and decided that he wanted to make one because ‘it looked fun.’
The reason I bring this up is because this film basically steals about 80% of its scenes and plot points from ‘Man from Deep River’ (1972) and ‘Jungle Holocaust’ (1977). I wish there was more to it than that honestly…but there isnt.
The plot? a group of students head to a remote part of the Indonesian jungles to try and learn about the cultures out there. Their guide is more than happy to take them to the sections of the jungle where the more civilized tribes live. But refuses to take them to the deepest remotest parts of the jungle lie for fear of what lies in wait.
The students naturally think he’s overstating the danger and decide to press on without him, by taking a slightly ramshackled raft out to go and explore these regions. Naturally; the boat gets into trouble, gets broken up by some rocks and the group find themselves stranded in a remote part of the jungle, where they’re quickly set upon by cannibal tribes who take them to a semi underground cave/jail area and…the rest of the film is them disgusting and semi torturing the students, while the students try to escape.
Its basically ‘Jungle Holocaust’ but about 10 minutes shorter, revolving around a broken boat instead of a broken airplane and the budget seemingly had a zero dropped off it.
For a super low budget Indonesian film, it looks pretty decent. I mean…the effects are a bit rubbish and the blood looks like something out of a Hammer horror film. But shots are composed quite well, they utilize styalized lighting, colour has a good part to play in helping create and atmosphere…But thats about all the good I can really say for this one.
The script is derivative to the point that, at first I got a creeping sense of familiarity…and THEN I realised what they were doing and got VERY annoyed…Barring one or two scenes where they did take an original turn. This things an almost toothless take on the cannibal genre, theres almost no nudity, no gore, Animal cruelty is still there (unfortunately) but all the fun associated with the Cannibal subgenre is nowhere to be found. Its dull. Dreary and just trudges along making me wish I was watching something like ‘Jungle Holocaust’ or ‘Cannibal Ferox’ or any of the other Cannibal movies that actually tried to do something original, rather than copy half a dozen other movies to try and make a quick buck.
The performances are all pretty dull too…Theres nothing really to speak of positively on that front.
The soundtracks totally forgettable too…barring the opening titles…which inexplicably use ‘Robots’ from Kraftwerks ‘Man Machine’ album…the only electronic pop song featured in a score thats basically droning.
I do have a theory for that though…’Robots’ was still pretty new at the time this film came out, and the titles and end credits for this film were seemingly stored seperately from the movie itself (presumably so that the correct languages could be displayed when distributing to international audiences) The ngatives for these titles and credits are now long gone. and as such for the Severin Bluray release, they had to go back to a 35mm German print of the film to restore them.
I believe that the opening titles of the film were redubbed to include ‘Robots’ to try and make it sound more contemporary…I think that the print was then cycled on to the rest of Europe who DIDNT realise that ‘Robots’ wasnt included in the original release and they just, ran with it rather than query it…I say this because I find it BEYOND hard to believe that a low budget Indonesian production would have a fairly traditional scoring for its Cannibal film for 99% of the runtime, but randomly decide to use late 70s Krautrock for its opening titles.
Im convinced the print landed in Germany either scoreless or with a terrible score attached to it, and the film board in charge of striking prints of the movie for distribution in Germany just decided to redub it to save the silence or peoples ears…
Anyway; I digress…This film was a huge waste of time for me. Not inoffensive…But if the best thing I can say about a movie is ‘It looked pretty good in some places’ and ‘It ripped off other movies 1:1 in a not totally terrible way’ then you know its not exactly onto a winning deal.
Boring, sluggish and lacking any kind of bite. It’ll be a hell of a while before I revisit this one…
TYTD Reviews 