Primeval is a failure in virtually every way that a film can fail: it is not smart, it is not scary, and it is not funny, and a film about a 25-foot maneating crocodile named "Gustave" needs to be at least one of those things. Instead, it hits a near-perfect triple play of being precisely the opposite of those things. It's not even campy.

The one thing that cannot be leveled against it in good faith is that it is unbelievable. There is in fact a crocodile who has been nicknamed Gustave, living in Lake Tanganyika in Burundi, and his length is not precisely known, (25' is plausible, but pushing it) and he is certainly a man-eater, although his precise number of victims is unknown, not more than 300 but likely far fewer.

I must go even a bit further and defend the film's ludicrous ad campaign (which mentions no crocodiles of any size or dietary proclivity): the studio has come under considerable mockery for dressing Primeval up as a serial killer film ("he is the world's most prolific serial killer...he is not human...and he is still at large," that sort of thing), but in this they are following the lead of National Geographic, of all places, who published that exact phrase in a March 2005 issue of NG Adventure.

This isn't supposed to defend the film. This is just to explain that yes, this story is out there, and frankly if you wanted to make a creature picture, and you read that Adventure article, you'd probably be pretty convinced that it is a great idea, and you'd probably end up with a considerably better movie.

Right from moment one, the biggest problem in the film is on full display: in Burundi, Dr. Disposable Blonde of the UN (Erika Wessels, I think) is overseeing the exhumation of mass graves full of victims of the local petty warlord. The Contrivance Fairy separates her from the dozens of locals and UN operatives in the area, and she is et by...dear lord, what was that?

A crocodile, we are told immediately when we cut to a newscast. A special newscast, too: for this is the newscast in which a corrupt senator threatens to destroy a producer from the news channel NNC (or something equally clever) who went to air with a story exposing said corruption without having all of his ducks in a row. This producer, distractingly named Tim (Dominic Purcell), is being chewed-out by his boss, and being offered a liferope: the station's animal expert, Aviva (Brooke Langton) wants to fly to Africa to capture Gustave, and wouldn't it be a brilliant idea to go just the two of them, and Tim's cameraman, Stepin Steven (Orlando Jones, and I've more to say about him), and the host of a popular animal show? In this way, they will save the network from the venal congressman.

I should have been clear, it's the crocodile that's believable, not the story.

So! Off to Burundi they go, meeting up with TV personality Matthew Collins (Gideon Emery, who you may recognize as the star of the 2006 Coca Cola Refreshing Filmmakers project, "Reel Monkey," although it is far more likely that you do not), and the requisite colorful guide Jacob Krieg (Jürgen fucking Prochnow). With all these pieces in place, it's time to get some croc-attackin' on!

No, it's not! First, we have to have a whole fucking lot of commentary on the civil war in Burundi! Don't bother re-reading that, it's going to keep saying the same thing. And that thing is, "at long last, the world has been blest with the child of Anaconda and Hotel Rwanda." Inherently, this is not necessarily the travesty that Primeval makes it. There's a long and glorious history of genre films tackling the brutal truths of the world. But that doesn't happen here. Here, the filmmakers just make a hash out of everything, and it's two bad movies for the price of one: an atrocious "social conscience" movie, and an even more atrocious monster movie. I might just possibly like it if it were a parody of the annual "Liberal Guilt About Africa" movies, but it's not, unless it's really subtle. So subtle that it's not funny any more.

There's a certain trainwreck sort of interest in watching the two movies interconnect. Mostly, this is just a matter of the crocodile getting used as the deus ex machina many times, in the same exact way every time: "the henchmen are going to get us, run, oh they were eaten." But if you're desperate enough, there are other things to cling to. My favorite is this: in the wake of Jaws, every improbably-large-creature film has what students of the genre call the "Little Shark," the beastie which is found first and blamed for the real attacks, despite the Richard Dreyfuss analogue's yammering about the bite width analogue. In Primeval the little croc is actually called Little Gustave, and he is in fact the warlord. So there's not actually anything interesting about it at all, besides the fact that the movie was so boring that I could make that mistake.

This is, in fact, a perfect storm of creature movie clichés: the ponderous moron who wants to keep the monster alive, even after seeing its killing power, the grizzled old hunter with a personal vendetta (in this case, revealed about 10 seconds before he is eaten), a cage and goat stolen right the hell out of Jurassic Park.

There's also Orlando Jonesn exemplar of the worst figure in horror: the "funny" character who is more joyless and deadly than anything else in cinema. Back to the sub-Hotel Rwanda theme: the character Jones plays (by the way, why is he still allowed to act? He's awful, he always has been, and it seems likely he will remain that way) is defined primarily by being black. His arc is almost solely limited to his evolving response to being in Africa. There is, as God is my witness, a moment late in the film when Jones has a joke - and it's meant to be funny, I'm sure of it - where he mentions that slavery was at least a little good, because it got his people out of this croc-ridden hellhole. I think one is supposed to laugh at this, not throw up in one's mouth a little bit, which is what I did. The most noteworthy aspect of this joke is how many similar jokes there are. Suffice it to say, between Jones' Uncle Tom routine and the idiocy of setting a PC morality play in a killer croc film, this is not merely bad - it is outright offensive.

Still, there's some good things about it. They never dropped the camera in the water. That's something to be proud of.

Oh, and the CGI crocodile? would have looked like shit in 1996.