Flasz On Film

Synopsis: Returning home to a secluded cliffside house in Hawaii, college student Lucy Pinborough (Johnny Sequoyah) reunites with her family and friends—along with Ben, the highly intelligent chimpanzee raised as part of the household—only for a night of partying to curdle into terror when Ben contracts rabies and escapes confinement. Trapped by geography and stalked by a once-beloved animal turned feral predator, the group fights to survive as help remains frustratingly out of reach.

When Stephen King introduced the world to Cujo in 1981, the challenge of the novel (and later the movie directed by Lewis Teague) was to turn an animal we have been culturally conditioned to perceive as harmless into a mindless killing machine. After all, the immediately recalled memetic image of a St. Bernard is accompanied by associations of family-friendliness, nobility, loyalty, helpfulness, and even salvation. Think of a St. Bernard and you probably think of a dog with a barrel collar filled with brandy looking for survivors after an avalanche in the Swiss Alps. By the way, it’s most likely a myth tracing back to a painting rather than any real-life experience, but the gimmick of Cujo relied on using this conditioning against the reader/viewer and exposing them to the fact that a St. Bernard is a dangerous animal simply because of its size and strength; and lethal when rabid.

Primate, directed and co-written by Johannes Roberts (who once upon a time made an effective shark movie titled 47 Meters Down) deals with a symmetrical thematic matter here as it uses a domesticated chimpanzee as the source of threat in a horror setting. Similarly, we have been conditioned to think of chimps as friendly apes capable of complex reasoning, formation of familial bonds with humans and even ability to learn to communicate with them. They are our distant cousins after all. But it is important to remember—and the movie relies on this knowledge—that chimpanzees are incredibly dangerous animals. With a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth and the strength eclipsing that of a well-trained powerlifter, a single chimp is perfectly able to literally tear a human limb from limb. In fact, there have been reports here and there of misguided tourists approaching these apes thinking they are as docile as movies, cartoons and other media would have suggested, only to have their faces peeled off, their mandibles torn out of their skulls and their guts eviscerated with nothing more than raw power and primal conviction. Now imagine that a seemingly domesticated chimp contracts rabies and you’ve got a movie.

Granted, turning this conceit into a half-decent horror flick isn’t a tall order but it needs to be acknowledged that Primate isn’t merely that. It’s actually very effective, competent and remarkably entertaining. In fact, it is very much a spiritual successor to Cujo in many ways: a simple scenario-based horror film where a group of people find themselves trapped in a secluded location with a rabid chimpanzee keen to brutalize, maim and dismember everything that moves, breathes or makes a sound in the house. Layered on top of this premise is a rather expected set of characters you’d find in every other slasher movie, from bimbos and hot hunks to younglings in need of protection and the final girl. It’s all perfectly predictable and formulaic.

But we’re not here to reinvent the wheel, are we? Primate is not a movie with an ambition to upset the cartwheel or break new ground. It’s here to adopt a well-understood template of an animal attack horror in the vein of Cujo—which itself is an evolutionary hybrid of a canonical animal attack horror like Piranha or Jaws and a definitive slasher in the tradition of Halloween and Friday the 13th—and to serve its audience a tight ninety minutes of high-intensity entertainment built on suspense generation and competent, visceral and evocative deployment of on-screen violence and gore. And on that front—mission accomplished.

Primate is a fun experience that pushes buttons where it matters while it fundamentally relies on tried and true narrative tools that keep the viewer both invested in the story and clinging to the shoulders of the slowly shrinking cast of would-be victims of what used to be a friendly chimp Ben and now is a frothing berserker gunning to do unspeakable things to those unlucky enough to find themselves within its reach. Because the movie wastes very little time setting things up—in fact Primate cold-opens with a sequence that already teaches the audience about what’s to come in an aptly graphic manner—it almost functions much like a roller coaster ride. Adrenaline shoots up, events whiz by quickly and we scarcely get enough time to even acknowledge the simple reality that the characters are poorly written or that their backstories are nothing but mounds of clichés. You have your compassionate lead, your annoying sibling, your conflicted childhood bestie, and your annoying stowaway who’s going to win her place. Plus, you’ve also got a deaf dad whose presence introduces an opportunity for at least one fun and scary sequence, which has been done before (see Hush) but it all registers as competent because we don’t ever get enough down time to wag our fingers or lose immersion.

In a movie like this you don’t really need watertight worldbuilding or dramatically accomplished character development. We’re here to see a bunch of hot-looking young people trapped in a house with a rabid chimp and, by Jove, this is exactly what we’re getting. All we need is sufficient fundamental logic and authenticity to keep us in suspension of disbelief, specifically in brief moments of respite from the carnage. And that’s exactly what we receive.

Therefore, I’m not sure if Primate is going to win any awards, but I’d like to see it kick off on the back of solid word of mouth because the experience of watching it is supremely effective. It’s very much an animal attack horror meeting a teen slasher revival tradition without any grand aspirations to functioning on a meta-level like Scream, let alone harboring any elevated socially-relevant themes. It is what it is. A rabid chimp loose in a house in the middle of nowhere with a group of twenty-somethings trying to stay alive and in possession of all their limbs. End of story.

And—pardon the pun—Primate rips. It thoroughly and wholeheartedly earns its right to be seen as a descendant of Stephen King’s Cujo, a few generations removed.