Primate Review

Horror movies aren't all that unlike the common "feel good" dramas- they're both purely exercises in audience manipulation. And in "Primate," a mad-slasher picture about an evil monkey from Paramount, I was manipulated. Totally and completely. I sat in darkness on the torn leather reclining chair, my eyes glued to the screen, not wanting to miss any of the surprisingly gory carnage.

There is no reason this should have opened in January, the famous "dump month" where studios send out their movies to die an unseen death: this would do some serious damage anytime of the year. 

As the film opens, the titular monkey brutally kills a vet (who visits at night, I guess it's supposed to be scarier at night) and escapes into its owner's house, where deaf novelist and it's owner Adam (Troy Kotsur) has left his daughters (the elder Lucy and the younger Erin, played by Johnny Sequoyah and Gia Hunter, respectively, who are not deaf) and friends alone in his remote Hawaiian house. The little primate has suffered a bite from a wild mongoose, who found its way into his cage, and the poor family's pet (named Ben) develops rabies. 

If you think I glossed over the plot just now, the film's lean eighty nine minute runtime means as does director Johannes Roberts (who shares co-writing credit with Ernest Riera). A veteran of the horror genre, I was impressed with Roberts' work on 2021's "Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City," and he continues to showoff his skills behind the camera here.

A plot like this runs the risk of the audience sympathizing with the animal, but that doesn't happen here: not only does the initial attack really dissuade any ape empathy, but the suddenness of the mayhem that follows means we sit at the edge of our seat at this unexpectedly successful little thriller. What it lacks in narrative purpose, it more than makes up for it in terms of pure movie making. The soundtrack from Adrian Johnston especially, which echoes the electronic simplicity of John Carpenter to great effect.

Lucy, Erin and friends (which starts at two girls and a boy, only to grow to include an additional two males), immediately make their way into the pool, once Ben goes berserk and sinks his sharp, drooling teeth into the leg of the junior sister. Ben stalks his prey from the edge of the water, sometimes finding his paws onto an unsuspecting person, and other times disappearing into the house. The groups' mission is to get a phone that works, so to call for help, but this proves quite difficult when there's an animal killer on-the-loose.

I saw "Primate" in a relatively packed theater, and it's exactly how one should watch this: every time the music cut and a character went somewhere they shouldn't, everyone went dead-silent, only to yelp in surprise at the shadowy figure just barely visible in the background, followed by a light laugh in the back of their throats, directed at themselves for getting suckered in again. I was doing all of these right there with them, and I'm only slightly ashamed of myself.

If you're thinking "Hawaii is the only rabies-free state," don't worry, the film does acknowledge this bit of trivia. It doesn't answer it, but hey, I only noticed long after once my fingers began typing out this review.