“Primate” is your typical mad killer movie with a rather amusing twist on its story premise. This time, we get a murderously raging ape at the center of the story, and the movie surely has a lot of vicious but skillful fun from eliminating its several cardboard characters one by one before eventually culminating to its very, very, very violent climax.
The main background of the story is a nice big house located in the middle of some remote region of Hawaii. It belongs to a deaf writer named Adam Pinborough (Troy Kutsur) and his two daughters Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) and Erin (Gia Hunter), and they also have a male chimpanzee named Ben, who has been another family member for many years since he was adopted by Adam’s recently diseased linguist professor wife.
After its disturbing prologue scene, the story begins with the arrival of Lucy and her two close female friends Kate (Victoria Wyant) and Hannah (Jessica Alexander) in Hawaii. They are warmly greeted by Kate’s older brother Nick (Benjamin Cheng) at the airport, and these four young people are all going to spend a good time along with Erin in the house while Adam is absent to due to some business deal involved with his pulpy but popular genre novels.
While everything looks fine and well when they arrive at Adam’s house, we come to sense some awkwardness among him and his daughters. While they still love and care about each other as before, his wife’s recent death remains to hover around them as an uncomfortable fact, and Erin has been a bit resentful about her older sister’s absence shortly after their mother’s death.
And we also notice a few alarming signs from Ben, who looks fairly friendly but then unnerves us as well as Lucy’s friends for no apparent reason. When Adam later discovers a certain dead animal inside Ben’s big cage outside the house, we instantly discern a big trouble to come, and, because of what was already presented to us at the beginning of the movie, we are not so surprised by what is revealed later in the story. Yes, that dead animal had rabies, and it certainly bit Ben before meeting its demise.
While he subsequently sends the carcass of that dead animal to a local veterinary clinic just in case, Adam is not concerned much before leaving for his work, and her daughters are certainly excited to have their own private time along with Lucy’s friends. The house, which is incidentally on a big cliff facing the ocean, has a nice swimming pool in front of it, and they cheerfully enjoy themselves there as having no idea on what is happening to Ben right now – even when he looks a lot more scared of water than before (This is one of those telling signs of rabies, you know).
Although it drags a bit during its first part just like many of those mad killer movies such as, yes, “Friday the 13th” (1980), the movie gradually builds up the sense of uneasiness as occasionally focusing on Ben’s increasingly alarming status. Even while succumbing to his dangerous disease step by step, Ben, who is convincingly presented on the screen thanks to the solid motion capture performance by Miguel Torres Umba, also seems to be aware of how his mind is helplessly going crazy, and that gives a little tragic side to what is going to happen sooner or later.
Once it goes for the expected killing mode along with its crazed ape hero, the movie becomes a sort of cross between “Cujo” (1983), “Monkey Shines” (1988), and “Halloween” (1978). Although he is relatively smaller and shorter than the human characters in the film, Ben can be quite lethal and menacing as driven by his sick rage, and that makes him a fairly effective horror movie monster. As a matter of fact, there are several truly gruesome moments filled with blood and violence, and I assure you that these moments will make you wince more than once.
As relentlessly cornered and menaced by Ben along the story, Lucy and several other main characters are certainly thrown into more panic and fear, but they also try to find any possible way for their survival as much as possible. What follows next is a series of generic scenes where some of them must move silently and carefully in the unlit spaces inside the house, but director/co-writer Johannes Roberts, who is no stranger to horror movies considering his several previous films such as “47 Meters Down” (2017) and “The Strangers: Prey at Night” (2018), and his crew members including cinematographer Stephen Murphy and composer Adrian Johnston, whose electronic score is clearly attempting to emulate John Carpenter’s iconic synthesizer score in “Halloween”, did a competent job of handling these conventional moments with enough sense of dread to hold our attention for a while at least (I particularly like how Ben expresses his raging feelings via his little communication tool, by the way).
The main flaw of the film is its rather superficial main characters, who are mostly as flat and colorless as many of those numerous victims of Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers. Johnny Sequoyah and several other main cast members in the film acquit themselves well on the whole, but they are often limited by their thin roles, and Troy Kotsur, a wonderful deaf actor who won an Oscar for “CODA” (2021), manages to bring a little touch of class despite his thankless role.
In conclusion, “Primate” works to some degree during its short running time (89 minutes) even though it ends up being a bit too typical to recommend despite its fun story setting. Yes, it does have that clichéd moment of last-minute surprise you can expect from many mad killer flicks, and this is effectively delivered, but the movie could do more than that in my humble opinion.
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