Primeval

Primeval (2007)

Directed by: Michael Katleman
Written by: John D. Brancato and Michael Ferris
Starring: Dominic Purcell, Brooke Langton, Orlando Jones, Gabriel Malema, Gideon Emery, Jürgen Prochnow, Linda Mpondo, Lehlohonolo Makoko, Dumisani Mbebe, Eddy Bekombo, Ernest Ndhlovu

Not to be confused with the 2005 direct to video release, Sasquatch Hunters, which came up on my IMDb search for this movie (all these reviews are actually copied and pasted from IMDb - this one is by somebody called goatorgy127).

Yeah, I'm funny. Anyway, this is the movie about the serial killer who claimed the lives of four hundred people or something. That's right, it's a giant crocodile (crocodile or alligator? I can never tell the difference. I was under the impression that alligators lived in Florida and crocodiles lived on the Nile (and caimans come from the Cayman islands) but apparently this is not the case...). Right, so it's the supposedly true story (I'm not denying that there is a giant crocodile, I'm just suggesting that perhaps reality was twisted a little bit...) of a couple of reporters who are sent to Burundi to take some clips of a killer crocodile and I guess catch it or something.

Think Lake Placid set against the backdrop of the Rwandan massacre. I'm actually making this sound good... okay, so civil war is breaking out, and reporters are sent to the middle of the war zone... to do a story on a fuckin crocodile. Riiiight...

While they're there, they get a taste of the terrible injustice being done to these people, which makes for one of the many things that drives me up the wall: a splatter movie with a political statement to make.

I'm not sure what this statement is supposed to be (I thought it was 'murder is bad and Africa is a sucky place', which is a little harsh), but they were really pushing it. I mean, okay, they're trying to escape the killer crocodile, it's coming to get them and then... well, this dude is trying to get their laptop. What happened to the fucking crocodile? You kind of have to wonder how the hell this happens - I mean, this must have been a coherent story at some point.

But anyway, it was all over the frigging place. Obviously they didn't have enough crocodile stuff to make a whole movie (or they figured that Jaws, Lake Placid, Alien, Jurassic Park and Predator had already been done) so they stuck in all this other shit to try and make it more meaningful. I mean, who can trash it if it's about social injustice? I can, motherfuckers.

Okay, on the upside... um... the SFX were actually surprisingly good. There were a couple of shots of the crocodile in the rain, in the dark, which looked almost real. So kudos to whoever did that.

Back to the bad stuff. I forgot to mention that the acting sucked some major ass. The people were there just to look sexy. Dominic whatever and the chick were, at least. Jürgen Prochnow looked, as usual, like a cabbage got run over by a rototiller and Orlando Jones looks disturbingly like Jeff Goldblum... but yeah. I know what I'm talking about.

There's another crocodile movie coming out later this year (or maybe it's already out, I'm not exactly up to date with these things) called Rogue, which I guess is set in Australia, but I guess it's sort of the same premise. I can only hope that it will be marginally more interesting.

END COMMUNICATION