Primate
"Primate" feels like the Gordy segment from Jordan Peele’s “Nope” stretched to barely feature length at a lean and mean 89 minutes.
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“Primate” (now in theaters) is a creature feature that’s not an entirely new concept, but it’s a fun and grody enough genre picture that’ll please those looking for some early-year bloodletting.
College student Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) returns home to Hawaii to visit her deaf author father Adam (Troy Kotsur, a Best Supporting Actor Oscar-winner for “CODA”), younger sister Erin (Gia Hunter) and the family’s pet chimpanzee Ben (impressively embodied by movement specialist Miguel Torres Umba and crafted and designed by Millennium FX) after having stayed away for a while following the cancer-related death of her linguist mother.
Accompanying Lucy home are her childhood friend Kate (Victoria Wyant) and frenemy Hannah (Jessica Alexander). Picking them up from the airport is Nick (Benjamin Cheng), Kate’s brother and Lucy’s longtime crush.
When Adam leaves to do promotion for his latest book, the young folks do what young folks do – PARTY! Unfortunately, their rager is interrupted when Ben gets bit by a mongoose, contracts rabies, escapes his enclosure and begins rage attacking them.
“Primate” is directed by English genre filmmaker Johannes Roberts and co-scripted by Roberts and Ernest Riere. These men are no strangers to creature features having previously collaborated on “47 Meters Down” and “47 Meters Down: Uncaged.” Most of the movie takes place in and around the house’s infinity pool as Ben can’t swim and is water-adverse, which also recalls a classic kill from Roberts’ “The Strangers: Prey at Night.”
I couldn’t help but be a bit saddened by “Primate” as Ben goes from sweetheart to psychopath in an instant through no fault of his own. It’s like the Gordy segment from Jordan Peele’s “Nope” stretched to barely feature length at a lean and mean 89 minutes. I got a kick out of seeing these pretty young things get uglied up by a chimp with a chip on his shoulder as faces and jaws get torn off and some of these folks really had it coming.
“Primate” is a huge improvement on Roberts’ previous picture “Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City” (admittedly pretty shitty) with a slapping synth score from Adrian Johnston (reuniting with Roberts after “The Strangers: Prey at Night”) and plenty of cool gore. Plus, Oscar-winner Kotsur fistfights a chimp! You could do worlds worse at a theater in January.
Solid review. The comparision to Gordy from Nope is spot-on, but what really grabs me is how the film uses the infinity pool as a natural barrier. Having that single-location constraint (Ben can't swim) actualy forces some clever tension-building instead of the usual cat-and-mouse chase throgh endless rooms. I remmeber seeing 47 Meters Down and Roberts definitely knows how to milk confined spaces for maximum dread.