At a time when the notorious Italian cannibal flicks were making un sacco di soldi the world over, Asian countries decided they, too, wanted some of that bloody lucre and started to churn out many man-eating titles, with one of the most popular — Primitives — hailing from Indonesia.
It’s kind of odd, however, as there is only somewhat implied cannibalism, but, to be fair, there are plenty of onscreen animal cruelties, including komodo killings, alligator atrocities and, most traumatic of all, monkey manglings. If you can look past that or, even worse, are a sociopath who actually enjoys that, Primitives is an engaging grotesquerie from the future filmmakers of Satan’s Slave.
A trio of stereotyped college students — the cool guy, the nerdy guy and the reserved love interest — are deep in the jungle trying to discover a new tribe of Indigenous peoples to write their term paper about. If I were the professor, I probably would have given them a B+ just for getting on the plane or, here, the flimsy wooden raft quickly destroyed in the basest of rapids.
Separated and captured by a wholly offensive tribe of “ooga-booga” natives, the cool guy (Barry Prima) and the love interest are chained to a rock and almost stripped down to their skivvies by people who apparently don’t understand the concept of clothing. Eventually, though, they escape and fall into troublesome quicksand.
Although this so-called “video nasty” gained a notorious reputation as a terrible film — mainly for the acting, writing or directing — it’s still mind-munchingly entertaining. Filled with plenty of stock footage — not to mention what I’m sure has to be a copyright-violating use of Kraftwerk’s “The Robots” over the opening credits — Primitives is a tummy-troubling entry in the celluloid cannibal phase. —Louis Fowler