Review: Primal - 2010

Primal

Director: Josh Reed

2010

Horror

A few students travel far to see some rock painting from 10.000 years ago. When they get there they have to go through a long tunnel to get to the actual site. Once there one of them gets infected by some sort of leaches and transforms into something that is not human. Mel, which is the girl name, become immensely strong and violent and has no problem tossing the others around. She runs of but soon starts to terrorize the others. It turns out that there’s something in the tunnel that she’s feeding. If it’s her former friends or wild animals doesn’t seem to matter to her. Soon it’s just a matter of survival – to kill or be killed!

Actually I expected this to be a pretty cheap splatter film. I’m glad to say that it wasn’t. The acting is quite nice and I don’t know if it’s the fact that it’s an Australian production that makes it more serious. There’s no humor in it which I like. The whole film can easily be taken serious and that’s always (well almost) a good thing. The story might not be the deepest but the characters are believable and nicely portrayed. I even think it’s kind of frightening at times and that’s not too common.

                                   

Although it’s not a splatter film it has plenty of nice gore in it. It’s not over-the-top but kept on a believable level. The transformed/mutated humans have really nice makeup attached to them. Ok, towards the end there are one or two scenes where there might be some overuse of CGI but as a whole I wouldn’t complain about that. There’s great suspense even when you can tell what’s going to happen next.

But there’s also things you know nothing about and my curiosity was running wild. The rock painting actually does tell a story but it’s not that easy to interpret. There’s obviously a presence in the tunnel/cave but what? We get bits and pieces of information but it isn’t until the end that we know for sure what’s there. Or do we? There’s an uncertainty about what’s really happening and even how the movie ends. I guess we’ll have to see if it was a happy or an unhappy ending if there’s ever a Primal 2.

Not that we really need one. I mean, this was good or even great at times but it stands on its own. We don’t really need further explanations to get the basic story. We can manage to live in uncertainty and that’s even a part of the greatness of the whole thing. If you haven’t seen this already, you really should!