Summary
Primate is an effectively nasty and inventive horror movie with a startlingly lifelike villain and lashings of practical gore.
You’re not supposed to root for the killer in slasher movies, or perhaps more accurately, you’re not supposed to admit that’s what you’re doing. But it’s no coincidence that most of the characters in these movies are scientifically designed to be annoying. There are exceptions – Scream is a good one – but they tend to prove the rule; slasher victims are shallow morons who exist to be killed as messily as possible. Primate thrives on this idea, but it also takes it a step further by making the Michael Myers/Jason Voorhees/Ghostface equivalent a cool-looking rabid chimp.
Rabies isn’t cool, obviously, but chimps are great. Animals are another age-old movie trick. Whenever you see one you’re supposed to immediately feel a sense of profound empathy – Pixar have made an untold fortune on this instinct, and continue to do so – and protectiveness. This is especially true of a chimp, an animal that can be strikingly human and intuitive. But what if the chimp is trying to smash your face into pulp? Well, this is a brisk, nasty, 89-minute answer to that very question.
A January movie through and through, Primate is a very lean, very mean horror flick from Johannes Roberts, building a flimsy narrative scenario around a disconcertingly real-looking chimp brought to life by some alchemical combination of prosthetics, subtle CGI, and the movement specialist Miguel Torres Umba. It smartly plays up Ben’s adorable humanity and keeps revealing snippets of intelligence even after he goes bonkers, courtesy of a bite from a rabid mongoose. But the primary function of the chimp, lets be clear, is to smash as many people to bits as possible in sticky flurries of practical gore, some examples of which are likely to raise an eyebrow at the very least.
Ben is a pet, technically, of Adam (Troy Kotsur, Foundation), a deaf author who has made a killing for himself and now lives in a very swanky glass mansion off the coast of a Hawaiian island. His late wife was a linguist who adopted Ben and taught him sign language, and he has been a beloved companion of Adam’s daughters, Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) and Erin (Gia Hunter), for most of their lives. It’s important to understand that Ben is usually a charmer and wouldn’t hurt a fly in order to tolerate how much naive stupidity is on show when he goes postal and starts butchering Lucy’s friends, who are lounging around the house drinking and texting boys they met on the plane while Adam is away at a book signing.
That’s the primary knock against Primate, by the way. Everyone in it is a remarkable moron, even by genre standards, although to be fair I think they can be forgiven. All slasher villains are basically immortal until the final act, and often long beyond that, but very few have the strength of ten men, razor-sharp teeth, and enough agility to clamber all over the walls and ceilings. The only thing Ben can’t do is swim, and with hydrophobes being pretty famously averse to water, the house’s cliffside pool becomes a place of unlikely refuge while Lucy, Erin, and the rest of the gang brainstorm how best to sneak to one of the various phones left charging around the property before they’re messily ripped limb from limb.
Roberts has tons of fun with all this. He consistently comes up with new, novel ways of making Ben frightening and playing with the dimensions of the house, deploying lots of little lighting and staging tricks to keep things fresh. The movie is generous with its gore – a face gets peeled off in the first couple of minutes – but is also careful to build up to each moment of carnage with appropriate tension and frantic near-misses. Virtually every scene goes on a beat or two longer than you’d necessarily expect, and this gives the whole thing an effectively stressful rhythm periodically punctuated by moments of outright insanity.
Not that you’ll care. The characters are all paper-thin at best and actively off-putting at worst, and they have no real purpose beyond being fodder for Ben’s violence. I’m really not sure this is how rabies actually works, but I did enjoy how the subtler aspects of Umba’s ape portrayal lend Ben a bit of eerie humanity, without bothering to try and imply that he’ll ever remember his old self and become suddenly sympathetic to his quivering victims. Primate’s refreshingly uncomplicated and unambitious like that. Nothing happens in it that you won’t expect, but the way it happens still manages to surprise you, if only because of how sadistic it all feels. In this case, though, I’m pretty sure that’s the point.
