The Primevals (2023)

After Sherpa kill a rampaging yeti in Tibet, a tiny, not quite official expedition, lead by Dr Claire Collier (Juliet Mills), goes on the look-out for more of them. Apart from Collier, the group consists of retired big game hunter – as well as owner of one of the best names imaginable – Rondo Montana (Leon Russom), long-time yeti-believer and male lead Matt Connor (Richard Joseph Paul), anthropology student Kathy (Walker Brandt) and yeti hater (and local guide) Siku (Tai Thai).

There’s more than a curious yeti rampage or two going on, though, and soon, the expedition lands in the middle of (Edgar Rice)Burroughs country.

Apparently mostly shot in 1994, this labour of love directed by special effects expert David Allen (who died in 1999), was left unfinished on the shelves of Full Moon pictures. Years after a crowd-funding campaign to finish the film, it has finally been released.

And it is very much a film made with someone exactly like me as its ideal audience in mind. There’s an immense sense of love on screen for a lot of the best things in life: Ray Harryhausen’s stop motion animation, pulp adventure in the spirit of Edgar Rice Burroughs, Doug McClure adventures, the 80s adventure movie boom, the Shaver Mystery (or similar fun Fortean matter), and Nigel Kneale read as pulp.

All of these things come to life again on screen here in a way that’s obviously pretty nostalgic, but also realized with the kind of enthusiasm and craft that transcends mere nostalgia to turn this not into a copy of the tradition but a genuine, breathing part of it.

Sure, one could nit-pick that the film’s portrayal of non-Western cultures isn’t great, the acting doesn’t always hit the mark completely – though Mills in the scientist role typically reserved for a man is great, as is Leon Russom talking about the eyes of dying giraffes – and that there’s a little too much monster-less slack between the incredible Sherpa vs yeti start of the movie. However, all of this is counteracted by the sheer joyfulness of the project, its lack of self-conscious irony and all the love and care that has been put into every second on screen. Not bad for a movie that nearly wouldn’t have existed in finished form at all.

In short: Puppet Master II (1990)

Another group of doomed psychic researchers – though these are government-sponsored parapsychologist – visit the house of Toulon (Steve Welles), maker of living puppets to find out if there’s any truth to the insane gibbering of the last survivor of the first film. Little do they expect that the puppets have revived Toulon, who now roams the house bundled up like the Invisible Man. To keep his puppets alive, the puppet master needs them to collect glands (or whatever, but glands are the traditional thing to collect in such a case) from human brains. He’d rather prefer his puppets to harvest the stuff from outside his home, but the area isn’t exactly populated, and the puppets are not terribly good at keeping brain parts unroasted (which is what happens when you build a flamethrower into one of your dolls and send it out brain-gathering, I suppose, therefore Toulon only has himself to blame), so the researchers are still doomed.

Things become a bit more complicated when Toulon decides the research team’s leader Carolyn (Elizabeth Maclellan) is the reincarnation of his dead wife Elsa. Look, Toulon, bandages don’t make you a mummy!
I don’t think the second of many, many Puppet Master films of Charles Band’s puppet obsessed outfit Full Moon is as fun as the first one, but we are still at a point in time here when Band productions were at least trying to be actually entertaining films in the classic low budget tradition. Consequently, director David Allen (despite being more of an effects guy than a filmmaker in his own right for most of his career) delivers a decent little horror movie that – for my tastes – could use a bit more of the spirited weirdness of the first film (no stuffed poodle here, that’s for sure) but that’s working the few assets it has – a decent cast, puppets – as hard as financially viable.

There are certainly far worse ways to while away ninety minutes than with this variation of various mummy films, but with killer dolls. And because the cruel and uncaring universe had a pretty good day when it caused Puppet Master II to happen, it ends on a final scene so loveably bizarre I can’t help but approve of the whole Puppet Master endeavour up to this point despite my general annoyance with Charles Band as doll movie impresario on account of it.