Primitif, a cannibal film released in 1980, adds nothing to the genre and barely registers as part of it, despite the filmmakers’ obvious intent to make it one. To be considered a movie about cannibalism, there should, at the very least, be some consumption of the human body. To be fair, there might be one instance of it, but even then, a few seconds in a ninety-minute feature is not really enough to be considered a picture about the consumption of human flesh.

As it stands, there is a bit of horror within this movie, so it is not all bad. The story concerns a group of students looking for a lost tribe in the jungle, already a recipe for disaster and one that any connoisseur of horror films, or amateur for that matter, can predict right from the outset. The group heads downriver on a raft, gets into an accident, gets split up and runs into the cannibal tribe. From there, the movie drags on for quite a while without much to grab onto. The acting is not as good as one might hope for, even in a B film, and as such, you do not really care about any of the characters. It even gets to a point where a person hopes that the cannibals finally just get to it and start to chow down on their captives. Instead, they eat what look like worms, kill an alligator and an ape, quite cruelly, one must say, yet never do they eat any human flesh. Director Sisworo Gautama Putra had a chance to make this outing an interesting one and instead went for cheap gore at the expense of the animal kingdom. That, and having the tribe lick a newborn baby clean of all the blood from its birth.

Being a horror movie did not keep it from having a bit of ridiculousness run right through it. The wigs some of the tribe wore were both ill-fitting and silly-looking, as were the reactions of some of the women who were in awe of the young student girl’s clothes. The language, the actions, and almost everything the tribe did was cheesy at its finest, very rarely rising above that. One of the very best and absolute worst moments took place during the final act after an escape was made by the students and a tribesman threw an axe at the young man, only for him to duck and have it come back like a boomerang, incapacitating the villain who had thrown it in the first place.

The phrase, ‘if you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all’ comes to mind when watching this film as it features all the basic clichés of the genre. Primitif takes from the playbook of every other cannibal movie in existence while offering little, if anything, in return. That said, if someone is in the mood to kill off a couple of hours without taxing the brain’s logic centers, this film is exactly what they would be looking for. It is okay, and nothing more.

2 out of 5