Everybody knows King Kong, but less nobly tragic simians were once at the center of a microgenre of horror that catered to those who liked their Jaws derivatives a little more on the hairy, bipedal side. Films like Link and Monkey Shines may seem disturbingly old-fashioned now, what with decades of progress in animal rights and documentaries showing us just how detrimental human-primate relationships tend to be for our evolutionary cousins, but there’s still something compelling about watching apes go wild on screen.
With Primate, director Johannes Roberts gifts audiences with a uniquely malevolent simian in Ben, a four-foot-tall terror—portrayed by Miguel Torres Umba, a Colombian movement specialist, in combination with practical effects work from Millennium FX—who stalks blandly likeable young adults and removes jawbones with the murderous abandon of Jason Voorhees.
The film lets the flesh fly early in a cold open punctuated with a gasp-inducing peeled face before introducing us to Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), a college student headed to visit her hearing impaired father (Troy Kotsur) and younger sister (Gia Hunter) at their secluded, cliffside home in Hawaii. Bringing a few friends with her, Lucy neglects to mention the devoted male chimpanzee that her late mother rescued and the family raised. Unbeknownst to anyone, Ben has contracted rabies from a mongoose bite (an anomaly in Hawaii), so when Lucy’s father leaves on a business trip, the once docile animal starts to act out in increasingly violent ways.
Primate is high-strung in its eagerness to get down to the carnage, so much so that the human story feels almost totally inconsequential. The cast of fresh-faced blood bags are bemusingly interchangeable as they jostle to wrest pathos from the underwritten proceedings. While there are a few interesting stretches where Lucy’s father’s deafness presents unique challenges, Kotsur can’t compensate for the film’s absolute dearth of emotional investment.
What Primate does have going for it is Umba’s intensely expressive Ben, who threatens to unseat Toby Kebbell’s Koba from the Planet of the Apes reboot series or Terry Notary’s Gordy from Nope as the nastiest on-screen ape not just in recent memory but all time. Apes appeal to us because they seem like us, can form bonds with us, and even communicate with us, but Roberts seems to have said, “fuck that,” given his delight in treating Ben like a particularly vindictive slasher villain. If only the filmmakers had put the same care and thought into their human characters, then Primate might have been worth going apeshit over.
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