Review: 'Primate' is a chimp-centered slasher movie that lazily slaughters its young cast in order of stupidity
What is the strange magic that turns seemingly intelligent people in their 20s into complete idiots? It’s being written into a horror movie, like director Johannes Roberts’ chimp-driven splatter movie “Primate,” which is designed solely to find semi-innovative ways to slaughter its cast.
In a remote house on the coast of a Hawaiian island, Lucy (played by Johnny Sequoyah) is coming home from college, with her best friend, Kate (Victoria Wyant), along for company. Kate has invited another friend, Hannah (Jess Alexander), who flirts with a couple of frat bros (Charlie Mann and Tienne Simon) on the plane.
Lucy quickly reunites with her family: Her father, Adam (Oscar winner Troy Katsura); her teen sister, Erin (Gia Hunter); and Ben (performed by Miguel Torres Umba), who is a chimpanzee who can communicate through sign language and a touchscreen with a symbolic vocabulary. Ben, we’re told, was raised as part of the family by Adam and his wife, a linguist who died from cancer.
Lucy’s barely unpacked her bags when Adam says he has to leave everyone for a day, while he goes off to a book signing where he also aims to pitch a movie based on the family’s life raising a chimp. That’s OK, though, because Lucy, Kate and Hannah have plans to party by the pool, with Lucy’s high-school crush, Nick (Benjamin Cheng).
Everything seems to be going fine, except for the thing the audience knows because of a foreshadowing prologue where a veterinarian goes into Ben’s enclosure, and the chimp — who, we soon learn, was infected with rabies, rips the vet’s face off. And Roberts (who made the shark movie “47 Meters Down” and its sequel) is content with letting the audience see the repulsive gore and body horror images in all their blood-red disgust.
There are moments to recommend in “Primate,” largely coming from Katsura. The actor, who won the Oscar for supporting actor as the deaf fisherman dad in “CODA,” brings some warmth to the patriarchal role — and his lack of hearing is woven into the script fairly cleverly.
When Katsur’s not in the picture, which is the entire middle section, “Primate” plays like another dumb psycho killer movie, with the attractive young cast making inexplicably stupid decisions and getting ripped to shreds one by one. The only tension Roberts mounts is making us guess in what order the characters will be dispatched.
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‘Primate’
★1/2
Opens Friday, January 9, in theaters everywhere. Rated R for strong bloody violent content, gore, language, and some drug use. Running time: 96 minutes.