'Primate' review: Killer ape thriller is too grisly and not enough fun
From the trailer, Primate looked to me like a campy horror romp, 88 minutes of wild rabid chimpanzee mayhem. So I was surprised the find the film actually pretty dour. Mayhem we get, but it ultimately winds up in no man’s land: neither particularly scary nor funny.
The film is concise at under an hour-and-a-half, so we don’t get a lot of setup before the action begins. Unfortunately, we don’t get a lot of character development either. Lucy Pinborough (Johnny Sequoyah) is returning home to Hawaii for the first time in years. Her father Adam (Troy Kotsur) is a successful author. Her little sister is Erin (Gia Hunter). Her best friend is Kate (Victoria Wyant). Kate’s tag-along friend is Hannah (Jessica Alexander). Then there’s Kate’s hunky brother Nick (Benjamin Cheng) and a couple of college dudebros whom the girls meet on the plane (Charlie Mann and Tienne Simon). I have spent almost as much time in this paragraph describing the characters as the film does. The women, for instance, can best be distinguished from each other by hairstyle.
The backstory is intriguing, but the film doesn’t do enough with it. Lucy’s family is still reeling from the loss of her mother, a linguistics professor, to cancer. The late family matriarch taught chimpanzee Ben how to communicate with a sound board, and the titular primate has since been adopted into the family. But what was life like for a linguistics professor, her deaf author husband, and their pet chimp for all those years? It’s a joy to see Kotsur again after his Cinderella story awards run for CODA a few years ago. He won Best Supporting Actor at the Oscars for that performance, making him the first deaf actor to do so. I suppose it’s a mark of progress that a deaf character is featured prominently in this film without disability becoming his sole defining trait. But he doesn’t really have any other defining traits either.
Ben is gentle and affectionate before the film takes its turn, which turns out just to be a rabid mongoose in his enclosure. There’s nothing supernatural about rabies, of course. This isn’t a demonic possession or witch’s curse or science experiment gone awry. We’re not in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. The Pinborough family is good to Ben, and Ben is good to them right back until disease strikes. Kind of a bummer.
And yet the creature’s behavior often beggars belief. Apparently, one of the under-reported symptoms of rabies is becoming an organized, calculating spree killer akin to Ghostface. In fact, there’s a scene ripped right out of the original Scream. Hannah — at least, I think it’s Hannah, hard to tell them apart after everyone’s hair gets wet in the pool — escapes the house and attempts to call for help from a car parked in the driveway. But Ben has the keys and taunts her by unlocking the doors before entering through the back. In another movie, such diabolical ape villainy might be comical. And maybe that’s what director Johannes Roberts intends here. But the circumstances are pretty sad, and by now we've already watched multiple faces be ripped off. There's a mismatch between the grim tone and absurd scenarios. It's possible to laugh and scream at the same movie, of course — see Ready or Not, which I recently reviewed. But here there's not much of either. Just violence.
And that's another thing. Why is this film so damn graphic? Stupid question, perhaps, from the viewer of a horror movie, but the bludgeoning and mauling attacks displayed here cross into a kind of sadism against the characters. For example, one character falls off a cliff to their death, but it's a whole other choice to show their head splitting open on the rocks below in close-up. Violence done to Ben isn't particularly satisfying either. Unless he has secretly been plotting this family's downfall for years, he's simply a sick animal. Who am I supposed to be rooting for here? The bad guy is rabies!
Am I overthinking the killer chimp movie? I may be overthinking the killer chimp movie. But it's its own problem that I'm thinking about the killer chimp movie instead of simply enjoying the killer chimp movie. While I appreciate Roberts’s direct approach to this material — no muss, no fuss, and doesn’t overstay its welcome — it’s too grisly to be campy, unless you’re into that sort of thing I suppose. It’s silly, but no fun. That poor serial killing monkey.