If movies have taught us anything it’s that chimpanzees are good for three things: playing baseball with Matt LeBlanc, playing hockey with Kevin Zegers and ripping your jawbone off of your face. Usually not at the same time, unless there are director’s cuts of “Ed” and “MVP: Most Valuable Primate” nobody told me about. Johannes Roberts’ latest horror movie, the modestly titled “Primate,” ignores the baseball and hockey bits but goes all in on the jaw-ripping. And to be fair, the chimpanzee also hits a lot of people with sticks.
“Primate” stars Johnny Sequoyah as Lucy, a young woman returning home to Hawaii with her friends Kate (Victoria Wyant) and Hannah (Jessica Alexander). Lucy’s mother died last year, so she ran off to the mainland to avoid her troubles, leaving her sister Erin (Gia Hunter) and deaf novelist father Adam (Oscar winner Troy Kotsur) to grieve alone.
Well, not quite alone: The family also has a pet chimpanzee, Ben, who learned to communicate via iPad from Lucy’s mother. When she died, Ben came to live with them and it’s been sunshine and roses ever since — except for the whole “intense mourning” part. Now that Lucy’s back, everyone’s happy. So while Adam is away at a book signing, they settle in for a night of revelry in their completely isolated house.
Oh, and one more thing… Ben was recently bitten by a rabid mongoose. There are, as Adam unhelpfully points out, no known cases of rabies in Hawaii. But it’s more fun to set a film in Hawaii, so I guess we’re just going to roll with it. Never mind how rabies got there. “Primate” certainly didn’t.
When Ben turns violent and takes a nasty bite out of Erin, Lucy and her friends get stuck inside of a swimming pool. Chimpanzees can’t swim, so they’re kinda safe, but Ben just sits there, staring at them, waiting to strike as soon as they try to leave. It’s not a situation most audiences are prepared for, so we watch in grim, white-knuckled fascination as Lucy works the problem and Ben periodically slaughters these poor kids in shocking displays of graphic violence.
“Primate” is one of the most vicious mainstream studio pictures in a long time. Johannes Roberts, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ernest Riera, presents this film like a gnarly 1980s shock flick. “Primate” quickly sets up the characters and premise, brushes aside all the contrivances are necessary to make the plot possible, then brutally savages a platoon of pretty people, all set to a terrifying retro score by Adrian Johnston. The music sounds like a demon from hell got a synthesizer for Christmas and went to town on it. Ten out of ten for the evil jams. No notes, except of course for the literal notes.
Ben comes to life through good, old-fashioned ape costume shenanigans. There was a time, dear readers, when people in monkey suits where everywhere in movies and TV. If a show went on long enough, eventually they made an episode with an ape, and that ape would be some guy in a get-up. It never looked real, because good ape costumes are expensive. And besides, before CGI became photorealistic, audiences were expected to actually suspend some disbelief, and bring a little bit of their own imagination into the theater. We all wanted to watch a story about an ape, so we all agreed to accept that some guy in an ape suit was, for the purposes of this production, an ape. Whether the costume and performance were convincing or not.
Johannes Roberts doesn’t have to worry about that, because the chimpanzee costume in “Primate” is pretty danged plausible, and performer Miguel Torres Umba delivers an impressive performance. There are moments in “Primate” where you forget you’re not watching an actual ape smash a real human being’s head open on a staircase. The vivid gore effects only deepen the illusion that what we’re seeing is taking place in a real, physical space, so Roberts’ punishing kill scenes strike hard, and with wet, meaty, screaming splats.
You could pick nits with “Primate,” and I guess that would be thematically appropriate, but the film’s tight runtime and uncomplicated, visceral storytelling don’t give the mind any opportunity to wander. Roberts wraps his audience around his finger and then points us in the direction of gruesome, darkly humorous devilry. Maybe Ben really is the most valuable primate after all. He’s certainly the most extreme primate, even though, unfortunately, he doesn’t snowboard.
“Primate” swings into theaters on Friday.
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