Primate, in theaters Friday, delivers what one wants out of an animal attack film. Viewers seeking a killer chimpanzee movie will find one that embraces indiscriminate, graphic carnage.
Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) is visiting her family in Hawaii. Her father, Adam (Troy Kotsur), is the widower of a linguistic researcher. He and his other daughter, Erin (Gia Hunter) have adopted Ben, the chimpanzee his late wife was teaching sign language.
When Ben is bitten by a mongoose, Adam sends the dead mongoose for testing but does not expect it would test for rabies in Hawaii. While Adam is on a book tour, a rabid Ben stalks the girls and Lucy’s friends.
The film begins with a graphic face mauling before flashing back 36 hours to introduce all the characters. Director Johannes Roberts, who co-wrote with Ernest Riera, keeps the promise this opening makes with several graphic kills.
Where other movies, even R-rated horror films, would cut away, Roberts follows Ben’s kills to their logical conclusion, no matter how gory the end results.
Roberts’ film establishes the trap in which the human prey find themselves. Adam lives on a cliffside, so blocking the front door, Ben has them pinned to the cliffside.
Lucy’s friend, Nick (Benjamin Cheng) suggests everyone get in the pool because chimpanzees can’t swim. That only turns the film into a standoff with Ben circling the pool, while Lucy, Erin, Nick, Katie (Victoria Wyatt) and Hannah (Jessica Alexander) wait in the water.
Everybody’s phone is charging when Ben first attacks, so distracting Ben long enough to reach one of the phones becomes the first goal. Other ideas for subduing Ben are logical, but Ben retaliates in kind.
The film invites more victims to the house so it’s not just the four women and Nick. Some of Ben’s attacks deliver poetic justice to the characters, particularly a talkative party boy.
Ben also taunts his prey, so he’s not just following his survival instinct. He’s sadistic, but with macabre humor.
It is a shame the camera won’t hold still. The standoffs between humans and Ben would already be tense without shaking the camera.
Fortunately, Hollywood movies stopped using trained primates for the well-being of the animals. While some films have used computers for their simian effects, Roberts used prosthetics, animatronics and other on-set effects to bring Ben to life.
As such, Ben never looks fake. But, because Ben is so believable, some of the kills that require CGI are more glaring.
The film seems to agree the audience came for the killer chimpanzee, so it breezes through character just enough for the audience to decide who they hope Ben kills. Alexander is especially fun as the party girl, but Lucy and Erin deliver most of the exposition via a FaceTime call while Lucy is boarding the airplane.
Nor do they spend much time endearing Ben to the audience. It makes just enough sense that Erin and Lucy trust the animal their late mother brought home, but that’s it. He turns fast.
Ben does appear noticeably foaming at the mouth as soon as Adam sees the bite. Still, he reiterates that there shouldn’t be rabies in Hawaii and testing was just a formality.
Choosing not to explain how this rare case occurred indicates how little the reasons matter. The reason is essentially “because you bought tickets to a killer chimpanzee movie.”
The film only cuts to Adam sporadically while he’s on tour, which disappointingly minimizes Oscar-winner Kotsur’s participation. Those are good scenes though, particularly his text messages with the veterinarian to whom he sent the mongoose.
Genre is a contract with the audience and honoring the terms is never guaranteed. Primate fulfills its contract to earn its place in the “animals attack” genre.
Fred Topel, who attended film school at Ithaca College, is a UPI entertainment writer based in Los Angeles. He has been a professional film critic since 1999, a Rotten Tomatoes critic since 2001, and a member of the Television Critics Association since 2012 and the Critics Choice Association since 2023. Read more of his work in Entertainment.
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