Review: Primate

Johannes Roberts’ Primate is the kind of movie that knows exactly what aisle it lives in at the video store, and it has no interest in wandering elsewhere. This is not prestige horror, nor is it elevated, metaphor-forward genre filmmaking. This is a movie about a chimpanzee going feral and tearing people apart, and Roberts wastes very little time pretending otherwise. If you came looking for ape mayhem, Primate is happy to take your money, pat you on the back, and point you toward a jawless corpse floating in a swimming pool.

The premise is gloriously, almost defiantly dumb. Ben is a pet chimpanzee, raised from infancy by a grieving family on a secluded Hawaiian estate. He is devoted, expressive, and fatally bitten by a rabid mongoose. From there, the movie obeys the immutable laws of exploitation cinema: rabies equals rage, rage equals blood, and blood must be spilled liberally and creatively. Ben does not simply kill. He maims, pounds, rips, gnaws, and removes faces with the single-minded enthusiasm of a slasher villain who’s just discovered opposable thumbs.

Roberts kicks things off with a brisk, nasty cold open that promises peeled flesh and follows through. After that, Primate settles into its primary mode: a parade of blandly attractive young people making increasingly poor decisions while being hunted by a four-foot-tall engine of simian wrath. Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) returns home with a few college-aged friends to visit her father (Troy Kotsur) and sister (Gia Hunter), only to discover that their childhood pet has become Furious George. Dad leaves town, the house becomes a fortress, and the body count starts ticking upward.

The human characters are, to put it kindly, functional. They exist to scream, bleed, and attempt escape routes that will inevitably fail. Their personalities blur together into a slurry of mild likability and genre-required stupidity. There’s a potential love interest, a couple of annoying hangers-on, and at least one person you’ll mentally tag as “dead meat” within seconds of their introduction. Primate has neither the patience nor the interest to deepen these roles, and while that’s a flaw, it’s also very much the point.

What does work surprisingly well is Troy Kotsur’s presence. His scenes with his daughters, conducted in American Sign Language, introduce brief pockets of quiet and sincerity that the movie otherwise lacks. These moments don’t add much thematically, but they ground the film just enough to keep it from feeling entirely disposable. Still, once Ben goes fully rabid, even these gestures feel like set dressing between dismemberments.e

Miguel Torres Umba’s physical performance as Ben is the movie’s true centerpiece. Aided by practical effects from Millennium FX, Ben is expressive, terrifying, and often weirdly funny. His blank stares and sudden explosions of violence give him the personality of a slasher icon rather than an animal, which feels entirely intentional. Roberts isn’t interested in animal psychology or tragic inevitability; Ben is treated like a masked killer with fur, and the film is better for it.

Budgetary limitations are obvious. Roberts avoids wide shots, relying on close-ups, fast cutting, and suggestion to sell the illusion. You won’t see Ben swinging majestically through trees or sprinting across open spaces. Instead, you get flashes of claws, teeth, and blood, edited just enough to let your imagination do the heavy lifting. It’s not elegant, but it’s effective.

Adrian Johnston’s score does a tremendous amount of work, buzzing and throbbing with Carpenter-esque insistence and giallo flavor. It gives Primate a sense of momentum and menace that the visuals alone might not sustain. One can easily imagine the soundtrack outliving the movie itself on vinyl, spun lovingly by horror nerds who remember the jaw-ripping fondly.

Is Primate about anything? Not really. It gestures vaguely at grief, responsibility, and the dangers of keeping wild animals as pets, but these ideas barely register beneath the crunch of bone. This is a January horror movie in the purest sense: short, nasty, and content to be forgotten once the credits roll.

Still, there’s something admirable about its honesty. Primate doesn’t pretend to be smarter or deeper than it is. You paid to see a chimpanzee rip someone’s face off, and Johannes Roberts delivers—efficiently, enthusiastically, and with just enough craft to keep things from collapsing entirely. For a cheap grindhouse thrill, that’s more than enough.

3/5