Despite my brother being an executive producer on the movie, I’m going to give Primate a fair shake. Thankfully, it’s pretty easy this time around, because this chimp-fueled Cujo is a riot even without familial bias.
Primate is a mean, lean, and gruesomely thrilling 90-minute horror flick about a bunch of good-looking young people who are cornered when their pet chimpanzee Ben gets rabies and turns homicidal. Character names, relationships, and more barely matter, because the only thing that does is the promise that you’re going to see a chimp doing some very naughty things.
Writer/director Johannes Roberts spends a few minutes setting the scene before unleashing violence. From the moment Ben goes off script, Roberts squeezes you by the throat and doesn’t let go. Primate is as tense as a ballet with a stage covered in banana peels; it possesses multiple well-executed sequences that pull at your innards as you watch. Thanks to some terrific and frightening costuming by Verity Hawkes (Ben is played admirably by Miguel Torres Umba), Primate presents a truly terrifying (yet still slightly sympathetic) baddie whose madness demands human flesh.
One scene is downright jaw dropping.
The cast, notably Final Girl Johnny Sequoyah, is terrific given the material at hand: the slightest of scripts, but plenty to serve up what Roberts is cooking. Sequoyah definitely deserves more starring roles, while casting Troy Kotsur as her on-screen (and deaf) father was inspired–and no, not for inclusion reasons.
If anything, Roberts doesn’t utilize him enough; while he briefly incorporates Kotsur’s disability into one key horror sequence, he could have and should have leaned in harder. I would have loved to see a scene where Ben hunts Kotsur through his home, the man having to rely solely on his other senses to survive.
The same could be said for the film’s setting: given that the action happens almost entirely on the edge of a cliff, there is a notable lack of scaling rocks in an attempt to escape their chimp nightmare.
But those are minor grievances. For those who like their horror movies direct and to-the-point, stuffed with some satisfying goriness and loads of tension, Primate is a bone-crunching good time. And I’m not just saying that because of my brother.
Review by Erik Samdahl. Erik is a marketing and technology executive by day, avid movie lover by night. He is a member of the Seattle Film Critics Society.