Plots(1)
Anja, Mel and four friends join anthropology student, Dace, on a journey to study a remote, ancient rock painting. Their excitement vanishes when Mel becomes delirious after skinny-dipping in a water hole. Feverish, bleeding, confused, she physically and mentally regresses into a vicious predatory state. Mel has gone primal. Mel's lover and friends realise they are the prey as she savagely hunts them down. Their only hope of survival is to escape through a cave, where Anja learns too late the dark meaning of the rock art they came to study. (Kaleidoscope Home Entertainment)
(more)Reviews (1)
After a long time, a pleasant surprise from Australia. A group of six young people go to the Australian bush to study cave paintings, but after being attacked by mutated leeches, rabbits and insects, they have no choice but to study the fangs some of them are growing, and they won’t do that without blood. Primal is good monster horror (no, it doesn’t end with the teeth…). For most of the film, the directors manage to build a very unsettling atmosphere, the characters are likeable and generally act in an understandable and logical way (with the exception of one of them, but he’s intentionally written that way). If in the previous sentence I hadn’t had to use the words “most of” and “generally”, I would be absolutely thrilled and I would give the film five stars. Unfortunately, as I’m sure you’ve figured out, there are several moments that grind, and very loudly. You are enjoying a lovely horror atmosphere, maybe even feeling scared, and then comes a very bad special effect, a badly executed action scene, unsuitable music, or someone behaving in a way that makes you want to slap them, and all that good impression is gone, and though it will come back, the unpleasant aftertaste remains. I’m giving it 7/10 and I reckon that in the coming days I will give and take back a star more than once.
()