Primate

Primate begins with a familiar enough setup for a horror of its kind. Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) and her friends fly back to her family home in Hawaii during summer break, reuniting with her sister, father and Ben, the family’s beloved pet chimp. Highly intelligent and domesticated, Ben fits into the family like a younger brother, showing empathy, joy and communicating using a tablet. However, when Ben is bitten by a mongoose in his cage, the gentle creature in him begins to vanish, and a rabies-induced feral force of nature emerges. With her father away on business, Lucy and the others are forced into a desperate struggle for survival as the bloodthirsty Ben begins to pick them off one by one.

If you are looking for horror movie tropes and clichés, look no further than Primate. Director Johannes Roberts has delivered a gory flick that knows exactly what it is, completely unashamedly and with very little depth. With a runtime of only 89 minutes, the plot wastes no time in getting down to business, introducing our main characters briefly but just enough so we get to grips with who they are. We only get to meet Ben momentarily as the sweet little chimp, and it would have been nice to experience this incarnation a little longer before he loses his marbles.

Because of this haste, you never truly latch on to any of the characters, and ironically, you feel a greater level of empathy for the chimpanzee and root for him more than the insufferable, stereotypical teenagers. You find yourself feeling really sorry for Ben because, as Lucy says during the film, it isn’t his fault that he begins acting in this deadly way, and the villain they are facing isn’t really their pet chimp anymore.

Where the feature excels is in the performance of actor and movement specialist Miguel Torres Umba, who does well embodying the fervent monkey, and each murderous sequence makes you flinch, squirm and leaves you chillingly disturbed. Courtesy of some of the writing, characters also make smart and calculated decisions, which is surprising for a movie of this genre, but this does mean that a large amount of time is spent with the teenagers floating in the pool while a hydrophobic Ben waits for them on dry land. The one and only Troy Kotsur of Sian Heder’s CODA fame is also criminally underused as the out-of-town father, removed from most of the major action until the closing minutes of the film.

The real nail in the coffin for this movie is that it is funnier than it is scary. Each cat and mouse sequence usually climaxes with a chuckle inducing moment where characters are either outwitted by the chimp or are unaware of the true danger he poses. While it is fun to watch characters wrestle with a deranged monkey for a bit, ultimately, Primate is an injection of torture porn that has very little else to it.