Released: 22nd January
Seen: 14th April
On Feb 16th 2009, a chimpanzee named Travis mauled a woman. Travis was owned by Sandra Herald and on this day he was acting oddly, including stealing Sandra’s car keys and refusing to stay inside the house. Sandra asked her friend Charla to help get Travis inside, using his favourite toy as bait to try and lure him… Travis would end up disfiguring Charla, tearing off her face, destroying limbs and leaving her blind for life. He would be shot 4 times by police officers and still somehow had the strength to walk to his enclosure where he died. Charla would need extensive surgery, including a face transplant but she is still currently alive. This event really was a moment where a lot of people realised that chimpanzees could be incredibly violent and do a lot of damage to the human body… naturally this means a horror movie was kind of inevitable and damn, Primate is brutal in the exact way you would kind of want a movie like this to be (and yes, we can enjoy a film that does a fictional take on a real horror like the one that I just described, if we couldn’t then we just couldn’t enjoy films in general)
Primate places us in a fancy home on the side of a cliff in the middle of nowhere that’s owned by Adam Pinborough (Troy Kotsur), a famous deaf author who was married to a linguistics professor who passed away a year ago. That professor was raising a chimpanzee named Ben (Miguel Torres Umba) who lives in this fancy house with Adam. Adam is also being visited by his daughter Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), her friend Kate (Victoria Wyant) and her frenemy Hannah (Jessica Alexander) who, along with Adam’s other daughter Erin (Gia Hunter), will be house sitting while Adam is at a book signing. Things seem to be going well until Ben gets bitten by a mongoose and develops a case of rabies which naturally means every single person in that house who can have portions of their bodies torn off by a crazed chimp is going to get portions of their bodies torn off by a crazed chimp. Check your brain at the door, we’re watching a chimp fuck people up.
Primate is not a movie that really requires much actual thought to enjoy, even though it’s clear that quite a lot of thought went into it. Did you want to see a monkey fuck up some teenagers for 90 minutes? Cos that’s what you get here and it’s exactly as glorious as you hoped. There is no time wasted, if you were even remotely interested in a horror movie with an ape going apeshit on people then this film delivers that within the first few minutes by just having the monkey tear off a face in brutal detail. Just like how Cocaine Bear said “Hey, how many ways could a bear high on cocaine fuck up some camp goers?”, Primate says “Hey, how many ways could a crazy chimp fuck up some teenagers?”… turns out, many ways and all of them are brutal and glorious and fucking insane in the best way.
One of the smartest things that Primate does is that Ben, our killer, acts almost like a campy slasher villain who revels in the carnage that he’s creating. Sure there’s a lot of moments where it’s clear he’s just attacking wildly whatever is nearby but then you get moments like Ben tearing off someone’s jaw and using it to mock them as they slowly die and that’s the kind of gloriously messed up shit that makes slasher films entertaining. Ben isn’t just some random animal, he’s a character with a personality and quirks that make him feel more formidable as a threat. He’s not just a sick monkey who is lashing out, he plans things and that makes for some genuinely tense moments. Actually seeing this chimp sit and look around, working out how best to fuck with the central teens and then doing exactly that is some glorious tension building. They set up quickly that this chimp is smart and strong as fuck, so therefore when the time comes for him to just throw a 19-year-old around like a ragdoll you believe it.
The teens that make up the bulk of the cast of Primate are, for the most part, standard slasher characters. They have personalities of some kind but really most are just here to be part of the body count, but they’re actually quite enjoyable before that happens which means that you do care for them somewhat when they’re trying not to be killed by Curious George on meth. They do what you kind of expect teenagers in this kind of film to do, they scream really well, run fast enough to make you think they’re going to get away and slip up when needed so it’s easier for our murderous monkey to mutilate them into oblivion. They manage to also be smart characters, figuring out how to keep themselves hidden when needed but they aren’t completely flawless so they can make little mistakes like grabbing the wrong car keys or knocking over something that gets Ben’s attention. They might not be the most memorable, but they do the job they need to do… namely exist long enough for the monkey to beat them to death with their own limbs.
The real brilliant move this film makes is giving the dad role to Troy Kotsur. Sure, an Oscar Winner appearing in a cheesy little horror film is probably not where his career should be going (that’s an indictment on the industry, cast this man in more work goddamn it) but they use it really well by having everyone know sign language so there’s entire sequences where no one really needs to talk and the tension can go up, it also means that if Adam can’t see something then he can’t really react to it which makes for some tense moments when Ben fucks someone up right behind him. It’s a really clever little element that elevates this above the silly little horror film it blatantly is.
For a silly little horror film, Primate is also just stunningly well filmed for the most part. Its colour contrast is really well done, the way everything’s set at night but also clearly visible makes for some very effective moments. There are some shot choices here that are genuinely quite good, from Ben looking through a frosted window to a bedroom lit by red light turning one scene into something straight out of an Argento film. While there are some moments of editing that feel like they were done to hide gore and cut things down way more than it needed, there’s also plenty here that really shows that some real thought went into things. We’ve seen plenty of horror films about subjects like this that just go for the quick and easy shot, to actually plan some more elaborate shots that hide things just out of frame until needed for a dramatic reveal is just fun and it’s really good to see that they actually put in the time to elevate this visually.
Of course, even with all that obvious careful planning, there are some problems. Mostly, Primate lacks time to really set up what normal looks like for Ben so when he does go crazy it’s hard to spot much difference. Heck, the first time we see him he’s already a crazed murder monkey, then we flashback to fill in some past but not enough to show that things are different. They try to suggest that Ben has hydrophobia because of the rabies (they do this with a title card describing what hydrophobia is and how it manifests) which you’d think might be a way to setup how the pool is a safe space, but then they just have the characters know Ben can’t swim so he was never going to go in there to begin with. Little things like that kind of hinder the film, making it so it’s less of a surprise what the monkey can and will do and more like we just caught it on a bad day.
There are also a few moments where things push against what’s believable, namely why Hannah is here because they make it very clear very quickly that she and Lucy don’t get along. Not to put too fine a point on it but this all happens at Lucy’s house, no one who hates Hannah as much as Lucy clearly does would have her anywhere near her. It’s maybe the biggest problem in the film, they needed a bitchy character and couldn’t come up with a better reason to have one so Hannah’s just kind of there when she shouldn’t be but it’s also not well used. Her and Lucy don’t get to work on their relationship or deal with what makes them dislike each other (I don’t even think it’s really explained), she’s there to be a bitch and get maybe one of the more tense deaths in the movie but there’s no good reason for her to be there and it just kind of bothers me.
Primate ends up being a lot better than a horror film from the start of the year generally has any right to be. It’s fun, brutal and fast enough that you can get a good shock of enjoyment out of it. There’s clearly been some serious thought put into this just to try and make it as good as possible, sure it’d be lovely if they put a little more thought into it to tie up some loose ends and make some parts a little more cohesive but there’s enough here to give this film a bit of a kick that elevates it a lot. It’s certainly not going to be up there with the likes of Cocaine Bear, but it’s a good solid nature horror film with some fun shocking moments that make for an enjoyable watch.
Movie Meister Reviews 