I love movies that pit bad guys versus bad guys. We don’t get those kind of films often enough. Well, Nicholas Cage apparently heard the pleas from the minuscule group of niche fans looking for something off-the-walls and action-packed, featuring badass villains and a killer animal, and decided he couldn’t do his career any worse by starring in a film called Primal, where he plays a hunter taking on a killer mercenary while a carnivorous white jaguar roams around on a boat they’re all trapped on.

If the premise sounds completely ridiculous it’s because it is. Kevin Durand stars as a killer mercenary who gets captured by the U.S. Navy. He’s stored aboard a freighter that’s also housing various captured animals, one of which includes a rare white jaguar that Nicholas Cage picked up in the jungle. It’s a man-eating beast and he went through great lengths to get it.

Things go awry when Durand manages to stage epilepsy and then kill the guards. During his escape he also lets out a bunch of deadly animals from their cages, and then the hunt is on.

You can check out the absurd but highly entertaining trailer below, courtesy of Lionsgate at Home.

The whole thing sounds like something cooked up for Syfy but then someone thought they could hit Snakes on a Plane levels of success and figured they may as well dump it in the theaters for a few extra bucks and see how it goes.

I’m actually shocked this isn’t going direct to DVD, even though it has all the ear markings for a DTV release.

However, I’m kind of glad it is heading to theaters because this is the exact kind of dark horse film that needs more attention in our entertainment-starved marketplace.

Too many films are either overly-serious drama pieces and slices of life trying to win an award, or schlocky lame flicks pushing Hollywood’s indoctrination agenda. Primal is the kind of the film too stupid to push an agenda and too ridiculous to win an award (except for maybe a Razzie). It’s the exact kind of film we need in this era where action heroes are in short supply and solid action films are even harder to come by.

Primal definitely won’t be a masterpiece by any stretch of the imagination, but it sure as heck looks like a fun, entertaining thrill ride featuring two actors who seem to be enjoying the fanfare of the low-budget arena… or maybe it’s just that Nicholas Cage was too drunk to notice that he was in a Lionsgate film?

Anyway, the film is due to drop on demand and in select theaters starting November 8th this fall.