There’s a great deal of unpretentious B-movie fun to be had in this brief, brutal and slickly made creature feature
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here’s a refreshing lack of subtext and pretension to this week’s gory creature feature Primate, a straight-to-the-point riposte to the glum, trauma-heavy horror films we’ve been enduring of late. Rather than following his genre peers who are busy aiming for the lofty heights of Don’t Look Now and Possession, British director Johannes Roberts is happy to give gen Z their very own Shakma, the goofy 1990 schlocker about a baboon driven wild by an experimental drug.
That film took a while to gain a cult following, ultimately accepted by the same drunk Bad Movie crowd who took in Troll 2, but Primate won’t take anywhere near as long. It’s a far better, slicker movie for one, a surgically well-made crowd-pleaser that swaps out baboon for chimp, cleverly turning him from test subject to domesticated pet. At 89-minutes and paced like a rollercoaster, there’s little room for life lessons, although the film does make for a stern, grisly reminder of why chimps should not be considered part of the family (something many still don’t seem to understand).
It’s ultimately, and importantly, not Ben’s fault. Ben being the chimp who became part of a Hawaii-based family when the late matriarch’s linguistics work followed her home from the lab. He lives with teenager Erin (Gia Hunter) and her crimewriter father Adam (Troy Kotsur, Coda Oscar winner) in a lux, and crucially remote, cliffside house. They’re being visited by absent eldest daughter Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) who has retreated since the death of her mother. She arrives with best friend in tow, and some stragglers, for a weekend of dad-free fun, abruptly called to a halt when Ben starts exhibiting some alarmingly odd behaviour. It’s not just that he’s weird with strangers (he is) but he’s also been bitten by a mongoose …
