‘Primate’ Review
Stars: Johnny Sequoyah, Jess Alexander, Troy Kotsur, Victoria Wyant, Gia Hunter, Benjamin Cheng, Charlie Mann, Tienne Simon, Miguel Torres Umba, Amina Abdi | Written by Johannes Roberts, Ernest Riera | Directed by Johannes Roberts
Giving your chimp rabies will NOT turn him into a sadistic ninja…
I’d like you to pay close attention to the statement above, because you must understand the creative liberties Primate takes.
The plot goes like this: A chimp gets rabies. It then manages to channel all of its focus into battle tactics, including perfectly-timed ambushes. Don’t worry, though, there’s still mindless violence.
If, by now, you think I’m a bit of a w@#k£r, then the good news is that this film is for you! If having the faintest, most tenuous grip with reality is unessential to you, then you’ll be in good hands for the full 90 minutes of Primate. At this point in the review, I’ll admit that this is mostly tongue-in-cheek. The writer’s flourish, if you will. In fairness, the action was genuinely very suspenseful, and the way you felt genuinely quite trapped in the location was quite grounding.
In terms of characters, it’s quite an art for a film to create as many as four that I couldn’t wait to see disembowled. They were all jocks and cheerleaders who got their personalities from reality TV. In terms of the gore itself, I think it will be a hit for Gen X and above. It was practical-looking, but looked incredibly cheesy, and it came across like they’d ordered the prosthetics before writing the script. What this means is that the style of kill they went with during each scene felt random.
I think the fun of using chimpanzees as a predator in the 21st century is that everyone knows how dangerous they are, because of the internet, of course. I think Primate was, therefore, a lesser film due to the fact that the tone was fun/creative, rather than realistic and gritty. What’s more, for a relatively unserious horror, it was very rarely funny. This was made all the more frustrating because there was a SINGLE funny scene. This proved they could do it, but chose not to.
On a side note, the original soundtrack by Adrian Johnston was fantastic. It was maybe an hour into the runtime when I clocked it, which may imply how focused I was…
With that in mind, Primate probably has more similarities to Jaws than some would care to admit. Maybe this will be a classic that ages well in a few decades.
It’s exactly what you’d expect, but not quite as terrible as it could have been.
**½ 2.5/5
Primate is in cinemas now.
