It’s a killer chimpanzee movie. Out in January. Directed/co-written/exec-produced by the guy who made The Strangers: Prey at Night and Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. And it’s somehow good. What the hell?
Primate is set in a remote slice of paradise out in Hawaii. This was the residence of a recently-deceased linguist who made international headlines for her work with chimpanzees. In particular, her pet chimpanzee Ben proved to be smarter and more eloquent (in sign language, anyway) than most humans.
The good doctor is survived by her husband, a massively successful novelist. Incidentally, Adam is a deaf mute. Even better, he’s played by Troy Kotsur, the Oscar-winning actor of CODA who’s famously an actual deaf actor. Yeah, this fucking movie got an Oscar winner in the cast.
Anyway, Adam and his younger daughter (Erin, played by Gia Hunter) have kept up their lavish Hawaiian home in the middle of nowhere, while also caring for Ben as a cherished part of the family. I need hardly add that they’ve been holding down the fort while also mourning the death of their matriarch. Enter our protagonist.
Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) is Adam’s elder daughter, coming back home for summer break. She’s accompanied by Kate (Victoria Wynant), Lucy’s childhood best friend and college classmate. They meet up with Nick (Benjamin Cheng), Kate’s brother, a longtime friend and childhood crush for Lucy. This becomes a love triangle with the arrival of Hannah (Jessica Alexander), a vapid and superficial co-ed who promptly gets to flirting with Nick.
Got all that? Good. None of it will matter much for very long.
See, Adam is out being a massively successful author (book signings, movie deals, what have you), so our hapless victim pool is left to their own devices to party at the house. Sadly, this happens shortly after the wrong mongoose wanders into Ben’s enclosure, and now we’ve got a rabid chimpanzee on the loose.
Not to state the obvious, but Ben was supposed to be a beloved family pet and a highly valuable lab specimen. All those years of training and studying, all dollars those put into feeding and caring for him, all the personal and professional reasons that make Ben a priceless asset, and why the nine hells didn’t he get his rabies shots?!
To the film’s credit, there is a stated explanation: “There’s no rabies in Hawaii.” Right. Like how there’s no measles in the USA. What the fuck?!
At any rate, we now have a frothing homicidal chimpanzee running around. A mindless animal that’s stronger, faster, smarter, and more agile than any college co-ed. Pretty much the only advantage our victim pool has is… well, an actual pool. For real, chimpanzees can’t swim. The unfortunate tradeoff is that using a cell phone (i.e. calling for help) is borderline impossible while submerged in water. More importantly, one of our characters (I won’t say whom) got bitten and infected with rabies, so the clock is ticking.
Getting back to the initial question, how could this movie possibly be any good? For starters, it’s short. A brisk 90 minutes. Exactly what this film deserved, just enough for feature length without overstaying its welcome.
Secondly, this movie took the brilliant step of opening somewhere in the middle of the story. Thus we get a brutally graphic kill to set the tone and tide us over before flashing back to the first act and introducing the characters and storylines we don’t care about. Because when the monkey finally does slip out of his cage, those characters start getting killed off in quick succession and all their petty bullshit ceases to matter pretty much entirely.
It’s quite impressive how the film manages its sparse runtime. The characters are all given just enough dimension that their deaths all have impact, but not so much that we can’t enjoy them getting ripped and beaten into bloody pieces. Likewise, the themes of family are all just thoughtful and developed enough to give the film some semblance of brains and heart, but not so much to distract from the mindless slasher fun we all came here to see.
Case in point: The basic premise is that a cherished member of the family has come down with homicidal madness due to some plague, and he’s now in danger of spreading that plague to whatever loved ones are still alive. Which means that our antagonist isn’t really in control of his own actions, and our protagonists are desperately clinging to any sign that the slasher might still be saved. In other words, this is a classic “infected zombie” scenario — straightforward, instantly recognizable, and done to death, but nonetheless effective.
I need hardly add that our villain is a chimp — not human, but one of humanity’s closest known relatives — so the Uncanny Valley is in full effect here. Hell, it’s not always easy to tell which shots are an actual monkey, a puppet, someone in a suit, VFX, or something else. Even better, the filmmakers did a remarkable job of making Ben look more visibly monstrous as the plot unfolds.
The jump scares are generally annoying and the lighting has some issues. The colors are massively overdone in too many scenes, and I’m sorry to say this is another movie in which too many idiots never think to turn on a light. Granted, there are a few instances in which the characters need to operate in stealth, so it’s acceptable to leave the lights off in such a case. Not that it stops the bumbling idiots from making some stupid mistake to ring the dinner bell and kick the horror into gear.
That said, we do have a family — and close childhood friends — who are fluent in ASL. Which means they can quickly and easily communicate without making any sound to give away their position. Quite clever. On the other hand, Adam — the character perhaps best equipped to handle this particular rogue ape — is physically incapable of hearing all the danger around him. So he turns out to be alarmingly useless.
Even so, the deaf character is effectively utilized in a way that gives the film and the central family some much-needed personality. I might also add that Kate and Nick were clearly intended to be portrayed as native Hawaiians. And that would be a neat touch… if either actor was actually a native Hawaiian. Cheng is British/Chinese and Wyant is British/Korean. Sorry, but I can’t give partial credit for that.
All of that aside, it’s worth stressing repeatedly and emphatically how bloody this movie is. This is a slasher movie through and through, and it was made like the filmmakers knew it would only be as good as how gnarly the kills are. And of all the movies to give us some all-time nasty kills, who could’ve expected this one?!
The long and short of it is that Primate fucking commits. The filmmakers knew exactly what movie they set out to make, and they charged forward in making it without pretense or apology. As such, the runtime is short, the kills are spectacularly bloody, and the monkey looks great. Perhaps most importantly, everything is balanced in such a way that it’s fun to watch without making the audience feel too guilty or stupid for enjoying it.
I get why this movie was released in January, because it wasn’t really built for the big screen. This is unapologetically a breezy horror B-movie, made to be enjoyed with friends on a boozy night in. On those grounds, this gets a solid recommendation.