I’ll say this for Primate right off the bat, you’ll know pretty much in the first five minutes the answer to the question of how gory the film is planning to be. Some films wait until deep in the film, but Primate isn’t about that. it will stare you in the face, and rip that smug smile right off it. You think you know Primate? It is bananas.
After the tone setting opening sequence, we learn about how this titular chimpanzee, whose name is Ben, came to live amongst humans to begin with. We are introduced to Lucy (JJohnny Seqoiah), who lost her mom already, and is flying back to her home in Hawaii to spend time with her sister Erin (Gia Hunter), and her father (Troy Kotsur). Along for the ride is lUcy’s best friend Kate (Victoria Wyatt) and Kate’s friend Hannah (Jessica Alexander). There’s also Nick (Benjamin Cheng), who seems to know everything about the family, including Ben, yet Lucy is still going to explain that this boy is staying with them “for protection”. Shouldn’t her dad know Nick by now?
Their dad has a conference or book tour to go on down in the city, so he leaves the five twenty something’s in the mansion in the middle of nowhere, even after he finds a bite on Ben (who has been acting strange), and submits a dead mongoose he finds to a local vet to check for rabies, which apparently Hawaii doesn’t have. Well… they do now. None of this is a spoiler as the film literally opens defining hydrophobia, and its current common name rabies, and by this point, someone is already dead. Remember, they bring the gore right away.
The rest of the film is Ben getting more agitated, losing his mind, and getting out and starting to stalk the five.One gets badly attacked, and they reveal that Ben can’t swim, so they spend the majority of the film in the pool, trying to figure out how to get out, get help, find a phone, get to a car, all without pissing off Ben. Lucy is the technical star and tries using sign language with Ben, believing her best friend is still in there. Ben also has a tablet he can use to speak certain basic words.Every death was brutal. No one just gets stabbed and bleeds out like in a slasher. No quick throat slits.
A bit of a spoiler, but one person is ripped apart by Ben who tears into their neck, another is bashed on the head with a rock, another is thrown from a cliff where their head lands on a rock, one has their entire face ripped off so you can see the skull, and another has their jaw ripped off while Ben plays around with the jaw. This film unquestionably earns its R rating. And those are the kills, the gang still suffers multiple beatings, bites, and hair being torn so hard part of the scalp goes with it.
And I enjoyed the hell out of it. Primate knows exactly what it is, and never tries to be anything but. it is splatter gore, and only limited by the amount of people eligible for Ben to kill, and horror’s pervasive desire to have some ‘final girl” type character.For me personally, the character I liked the most didn’t make it, and the character that did the least did. Some masterfully executed sequences, like hiding in a closet behind a tarp praying Ben won’t find you, is then dealt silly horror gimmicks, like stepping on a remote, or showing how one girl deftly dodges broken glass, only for the next to completely ignore it.
So it might not be revolutionizing horror, but it is a damn fine, super gory, memorable blast that took a handful of characters, in a limited location, and held the tension. Does it all work? No. I refuse to believe that the survivors all took a simultaneous nap in the pool. Another huge plus here is that there is apparently an actor in the Ben suit. He’s not a visual effect. There’s a real Ben at least in most sequences. Maybe they touched him up a bit, but I love practical effects.
Primate is what I wanted Cujo to be after I saw it. I’m sure the book is better, but it just wasn’t a great film. Primate takes the pet getting rabies to a whole new level, and creates a memorable foe. I’d be shocked if there was a sequel, as the film doesn’t allow for it, but who knows. Inexplainable horror sequels have never been a problem for the genre.
I’m not monkeying around here. Primate is brutal, bananas, and a whole lot of fun.
Fresh: 7.8/10
