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Johannes Roberts kicks off the year with gleefully stupid Hawaiian gore
What a rabid way to start the year! Paramount isn’t monkeying around with Primate, a hard-R grindhouse B-movie with enough chills, thrills, old-school slasher shocks and laughs — both intentional and otherwise — to wake audiences out of any post-holiday stupor.
Primate ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Johannes Roberts
Written by: Johannes Roberts, Ernest Riera
Starring: Johnny Sequoyah, Jessica Alexander, Troy Kotsur, Victoria Wyant, Gia Hunter, Benjamin Chang, Miguel Torres Umba
Running time: 89 mins
Imagine the fuck-it-why-not pitch: Hawaiian home goes from island paradise to hell on earth when a family’s pet chimpanzee gets rabies from an infected mongoose. Why do they have a pet chimp? Because their recently departed linguistics professor mom (who apparently moonlighted as amateur primatologist) wanted to see how fluent in sign language she could make her little adopted animal Ben (Miguel Torres Umba — yes, a dude in a monkey suit). Also using sign language? Her husband Adam (Troy Kotsur), deaf author of such on-the nose bestselling thrillers like A Silent City, A Silent Scream, and A Silent Betrayal.
“How are the pre-sales for A Silent Death looking?” Adam signs to his agent over Zoom. Actually, they’re looking pretty good now that your pet chimp has rabies — especially since Adam’s prodigal daughter Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) has decided to fly home with BFF Kate (Victoria Wyant) and brassy brunette Hannah (Jessica Alexander) for some O’ahu escapades. Also plumping up the potential body count numbers are Lucy’s neglected younger sister Erin (Gia Hunter), their bo-hunk childhood friend Nick (Benjamin Chang), and a couple of boneheaded beefcakes the girls met on the plane.
What a feast for the progressively insane Ben, who begins the movie by ripping a veterinarian’s face off its skull and only gets more violent over the course of Primate’s lean, mean 90-minute running time. Although Ben could theoretically communicate via sign language, he (and obviously the director) would rather use a voice-generating touchscreen tablet with specific color-coded squares corresponding to actual words. “Lucy. Bad,” Ben prompts the computer voice by pressing the touchscreen repeatedly. “Bad. Bad. Bad.” Ben is clearly not happy.
Did I mention that Ben is played by an actor? Miguel Torres Umba apes the movements of a chimpanzee with all the grace and subtlety of a drunk frat boy in a Halloween parade. Upping the schlock factor even further — a feat which is frankly admirable — is the fact that the filmmakers clearly didn’t use CGI to create a realistic beast but rather took the ’70s exploitation route of having a short guy in a hairy costume. The monkey mask barely has any articulation, too, which gives Ben a pretty solid expressionless Michael Myers vibe. But with rabies-induced drooling around the mouth.
Don’t worry, there’s no attempt to build a back story with the family chimp, or convincingly portray Lucy and Erin’s presumably lifelong bond with Ben. He might as well just be some random animal with brute force and an unquenchable thirst to maim and kill. “Dude, dude, dude, dude!” protests one of the chiseled idiot bros when Ben starts to pummel his chest. “Whoa, Donkey King! You are freakishly strong.” He also has a propensity to gnaw on the jawbones of his victims. Cool.
Ben veers from being completely maniacal to unsettlingly calm to weirdly sly and calculating. Is he rabid or bipolar? Basically, he’s a simian avatar for all serial killers that pop up unexpectedly around a darkened house. (Speaking of which: why no one turns on the lights is beyond me, but it does make for some moody moments of tension in this nasty nocturnal massacre.)
Like most deliciously dumb movies, Primate is better experienced than considered. Director Johannes Roberts has a mischievous compositional eye for having his blurry-background chimp quietly menace his foregrounded victims, and a great sense of pacing keeps the mayhem brisk. His suspense chops are choppy, but his enthusiastic commitment to the bit is undeniable.
Missed opportunities abound, like one nail-biting scene when Adam comes home (again, not turning on the lights) and, being deaf, doesn’t hear any of his daughter’s shrieks as the just-out-of-sight chimp attacks surround him. The idea of a parent being so close to their own children’s torment — and yet be so oblivious — is heart-stopping. But the moment isn’t meaningfully developed to deepen the horror of this brutish bloodbath.
Primate isn’t trying to break new ground, just wallow in familiar tropes and gleefully revel in the excessive gore. And when Ben strikes, the movie even invokes a few genre classics by leaning hard into a brooding synth-heavy percussive score. John Carpenter fans will go bananas.
Stephen Garrett is the former film editor of ‘Time Out New York’ and has written about the movie industry for more than 20 years. A Rotten Tomatoes certified reviewer, Garrett is also the founder of Jump Cut, a marketing company that creates trailers and posters for independent, foreign-language, and documentary films.
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