God bless the “first week of January” horror release, firmly straddling the boundary between inept and competent in audacious fashion, always entertaining regardless of whether or not one could consider it “good.” Such is the case with Johannes Roberts’ Primate, an old-fashioned when-animals-attack creature feature, which is goofy enough to have a crowd shouting insults at the screen, yet competent enough to deliver some kills and scares that will be difficult for later releases to top. Taking the bare bones outline of Stephen King’s Cujo (beloved pet gets rabies, goes on rampage, kills strangers, etc.), Roberts adds some Chimp Crazy to the mixture, as the lovable fuzzball that contracts one of the world’s scariest diseases is none other than a chimpanzee named Ben. He’s got a silly little t-shirt, an iPad that he can use to communicate, a stuffed teddy bear that he loves, and a whole lot of foamy slobber dripping from his mouth. You might want to avoid looking him in the eye, too.
Before a fateful encounter with a rabid mongoose in his enclosure, Ben was a living memorial to his “mother,” a linguist who studied him and his capacity for language. She brought him home and integrated him into her family, much like other real-life relationships formed between subject and researcher. When she passed on, he stuck around their Hawaii home – where else should he have gone? – and fit in well. Her husband, Adam (Troy Kotsur), a deaf novelist, could communicate with him easily through sign language, and her two girls, Lucy (Johnny Seqouiah) and Erin (Gia Hunter), treated him like a sibling. That’s a whole lot of prologue to get to our inciting incident: the day of the mongoose attack, Lucy returns home from college with two friends in tow, looking forward to a vacation from her studies, happy to see her family again. Dad’s gotta jet to a book signing, but everything seems to be going well – their isolated cliff-side compound has a pool, plenty of food, and lots to do – and there’ll be plenty of time to hang out when he gets back. Even when he finds the corpse of the mongoose inside Ben’s pen and sees the bite mark, he doesn’t think much of it. Hawaii, believe it or not, doesn’t have endemic rabies.
Of course, that’s a famous last assumption on his part. By the time Ben’s caretaker (Rob Delaney) shows up, the chimp’s already in a foul, crazed mood. With good reason, Roberts opens with their encounter, then flashes back to fill in the rest of the setup – who wouldn’t want to smash-cut to their title card immediately after watching Delaney get his face peeled off? Yes, you read that right: It’s a gauntlet-throwing moment which reminds you it’s got an R-rating – this isn’t M3GAN or Escape Room or what have you, this is an honest-to-goodness horror feature worth making the thirteen-year-olds sneak into. The fact that Roberts is able to top this kill in sheer brutality – there’s one near the film’s climax that’s stomach-churning (and also quite funny in how it uses Ben’s innocent behavior to mock his victim), the worst thing to happen to a human jaw since Anthony Joshua split Jake Paul’s in two places – is astonishing, as is the quality of the absurdly well-realized make-up and effects-work put into making these scenes land with a visceral “splat.” The same can be said for Ben himself, a hybrid digital/physical creation performed by the movement artist and actor Miguel Torres Umbra, who brings an additional fidelity and character to the chimp’s movements. It’s really solid work, especially when compared to the pitfalls that a lower-budget feature can run into when bringing a fully-animated digital character into the ensemble.
Back with the sisters and their friends, nobody notices that the caretaker’s gone, though they do realize that something’s up with their chimp friend. It still catches them off-guard when he charges Erin, bites her in the leg, and forces the entire party into the pool, where, after a whole ten or fifteen minutes of dealing with this problem, it only occurs to one of them that the animal might be rabid. That pool becomes their lifeline – initially because Ben can’t swim, soon because of his growing hydrophobia – much as the car was in King’s novel, and there the kids plot their next moves while trying not to get too close to the edges of the pool. I mostly sided with the group’s resident asshole, Hannah (Jess Alexander), a Mean Girl-type who immediately goes after Lucy’s high school crush. She was the only person who accurately read the situation with a certain amount of cold clarity after an awkward encounter with Ben during the early stages of his illness, and thought there was something just a little odd about a chimp foaming at the mouth and acting aggressively, and for that, I give her props.
One can kind of understand why Hannah meets the fate that she does – she threatens to spoil our good time – and Roberts is keenly aware of how necessary on-screen stupidity is to pulling off a smartly-realized genre flick. He’s back in a comfortable zone, echoing his work on the equally silly 47 Meters Down after stints working with bargain-basement IPs approaching or past their sell-by dates (Resident Evil, The Strangers), and it’s not quite surprising that Primate is the best work of his directorial career. What is surprising is just how great a theatrical experience this is, and I hope you have people who laugh long, hard, and proudly at the buffoonery on screen and explode with shouts when Ben gets around to doing his murderous monkey business. Should this get in the black, I can’t wait to see what hilariously goofy explanation they come up with to justify a Primate 2, provided they stick to Friday the 13th rules and only focus on a single chimp instead of replacing our simian lead. No one likes a Tommy Jarvis, after all.