THE STORY – A tropical vacation goes awry when Ben, a family’s adopted chimpanzee, is bitten by a rabid animal and suddenly becomes violent.
THE CAST – Johnny Sequoya, Jessica Alexander, Benjamin Cheng, Gia Hunter, Victoria Wyant & Troy Kotsur
THE TEAM – Johannes Roberts (Director/Writer) & Ernest Riera (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 89 Minutes
Another year, another horror movie opening wide at the end of the first full week of January. Johannes Roberts’s “Primate” isn’t the typical stale slice of schlock that the studios typically feed us in the wake of their December dump of prestige films, though. While it’s still very much a cheap exploitation flick, “Primate” doesn’t take its “low“ genre (and budget) as a license to be as shoddy as possible. Instead, there’s some fun, clever craft on display, especially from the special effects makeup artists, who go absolutely ape with some setpieces so enjoyably gory that they’ll make your jaw drop clean off. And in addition to that, Roberts’s screenplay, co-written with Ernest Riera, has enough of a genuine sense of humor that it never needs to approach campy territory to entertain. Surprisingly enough, “Primate“ is the real deal.
After the death of their linguistics professor matriarch from cancer, the Hawaii-based Pinborough family has found themselves estranged from each other. Father Adam (Academy Award winner Troy Kotsur) has doubled down on his time away from home promoting his books, while elder daughter Lucy (Johhny Sequoyah) ran away to college on the mainland, leaving younger daughter Erin (Gia Hunter) alone with only the family pet, the chimpanzee Ben, to keep her company. Lucy’s finally coming home for break, though, along with her best friend Kate (Victoria Wyant) and frenemy Hannah (Jessica Alexander). Everyone’s happy in paradise for the rest of the day, but when Adam finds a bloodied mongoose in Ben’s enclosure and a suspicious wound on the sick-looking monkey’s arm, he sends for the vet. By the time he arrives, Ben has seemingly fully succumbed to rabies, brutally killing the vet and escaping the enclosure. Before long, the girls and Kate’s brother Nick (Benjamin Cheng) are cornered in the house’s pool, with a cliff on one side and an increasingly angry, hydrophobic Ben on the other. Will any of them survive the night?
More than anything else, Roberts’s commitment to practical effects wherever possible elevates “Primate“ above your typical creature feature. Ben always looks like he’s actually sharing space with the rest of the cast, and there’s good reason for that: He’s portrayed by the actor Miguel Torres Umba in a wonderfully realistic monkey suit created by the wizards at Millennium FX. In the age of motion capture and computer-generated imagery, seeing an animal character as fully tangible as Ben feels like a rare and wonderful thing, especially since Torres Umba’s physicality never once feels the slightest bit human. The actor fully inhabits Ben’s body and mind, turning in an impressive, genuinely transformative performance. His dead-on comic timing gives the film a nasty kick, essentially giving us silent-film versions of the one-liners of Freddy Krueger, Chucky, etc. The character’s actual physical presence is an unmitigated success; you can see every strand of Ben’s hair, every wrinkle on his knuckles, and see both the fear and insanity in his eyes, heightening the film’s sense of danger every second he’s onscreen.
Thankfully, Ben doesn’t always have to be onscreen for the film to be an effective single-location thriller. Cinematographer Stephen Murphy weaponizes wide shots to heighten tension and create suspense. With his short stature and ability to climb, Ben could be literally anywhere at any given moment, and Murphy has a lot of fun making you search each frame for him, occasionally throwing in some deep focus to make you question if you’re watching the characters from Ben’s point of view. Murphy and Roberts also create some clever homages to famous horror films (yes, the “Here’s Johnny!“ bit from “The Shining“ has been done to death, but seeing it with a rabid chimpanzee in Jack Nicholson’s place somehow makes it feel fresh again) that enliven the proceedings just when the characters start becoming irredeemably stupid.
Even with all that Roberts and his cast and crew do well, though, there’s plenty that they do poorly. For every well-shot and staged scene, one gets chopped to almost-unintelligible pieces. For every clearly-lit night shot, another is so dark you can barely see the incredible makeup work. For every deeply felt moment from Kotsur, there’s an overacted, unbelievable moment from one of the throwaway kids. For every moment where the character arcs resonate, another has a plot hole so big you can’t look away. Many of these things can be forgiven, though, mostly because what “Primate“ does well is so atypical of this kind of exploitation horror film. At this point in their creative partnership, Roberts and Riera have horror storytelling down pat; “Primate“ is perfectly lean (only 89 minutes) and delightfully mean to its characters, inflicting indignities for our amusement. Sure, the characters are paper-thin and do many things that defy all logic and common sense, but that’s part of the fun. “Primate“ is bad in many of the ways you’d expect, but it’s better in many ways you won’t. It’s the best kind of January surprise.
