Ben the chimp delivers on his end in a classic average January horror movie
Horror films have been the home turf for animals to savagely ravish our protagonists in as gruesome ways as a director can conjure up since a giant great white shark rocked up to the shores of Amity Island.
In Steven Spielberg’s 1975 shark horror Jaws, the titular shark, Bruce, dominates the sea looking for unlucky swimmers to feast upon in increasingly deadly ways. He was somewhat of a trend setter for this brutal sub-genre of horror films. Others that followed consist of a mutant grotesque fly, a violent anaconda and a rabies-infected St. Bernard called Cujo, to name a few.
Primate stands on the shoulders of these frightening animals and follows Ben, a menacing pet chimpanzee who is infected with rabies. Thus starts his violent onslaught on his family and unlucky friends who happen to be caught in the crosshairs.
Our unlucky cast? Step forward student Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), her younger sister Erin (Gia Hunter), her best friend Kate (Victoria Wyant), her frenemy Hannah (Jessica Alexander), Kate’s brother Nick (Benjamin Cheng) and Lucy’s father Adam (A vastly underutilised Troy Kotsur).
I would tell you more about these characters, but they are devoid of any depth or personality outside of being college students who like to indulge in a few drinks and make stupid decisions that no sane person would make. As you can imagine, it wears thin very quickly.
It’s not the cast’s fault, mind you. They do their best with what is quite a poor script. It often feels more like a rough first draft than a fully fleshed-out one. Director Johannes Roberts helps cover those same cracks with some nice camera work throughout, which keeps it visually entertaining when the plot suffers.
At least it delivers on what was promised — gnarly deaths and some squeamish body horror to make you wince in your chair at the hands of a rage-infused chimp. Ben lives up to his end of the bargain; violent, bloodthirsty and a menace from start to finish. It’s hardly the scariest movie of the decade as the promotion led you to believe, but it still has its moments that get the pulse raising, which is all I could really hope for.
Plus, is it really a horror film if it’s not being professed as the scariest one ever?
Despite sticking the bumpy landing on its intentions, it does feel as though there was a missed opportunity with Oscar-winning Kotsur. Reserving him to just a deadbeat dad, when you instead could have tried making a compelling story about how someone who is deaf would manoeuvre this scenario, feels like a more interesting angle to take. But maybe that’s on me for expecting a gripping plot in such circumstances.
Ultimately, this is the perfect January horror. Though some bits feel annoying and tiresome, you turn up to the cinema to watch a chimp rip through the cast, and that’s what you get.
