Written by Johannes Roberts and Ernest Riera
Directed by Johannes Roberts
Starring Johnny Sequoyah, Jess Alexander, Troy Kotsur and Gia Hunter
USA, 2026
I saw the trailer for PRIMATE and thought it looked like good, campy fun. A chimpanzee goes berserk and starts murdering people? Sounds like a no-brainer. Unfortunately, the movie itself turned out to be kind of a slog.
The story concerns a young woman (Johnny Sequoyah) who returns to her family's home in Hawaii with a group of friends. The family has a pet chimpanzee named Ben, who's apparently been living with them for years without incident. But then Ben contracts rabies and suddenly develops an appetite for murder.
The rabies thing caught me off guard. The movie introduces it almost immediately, as though the filmmakers felt they needed to provide a plausible explanation for why a chimpanzee might turn violent. But isn't keeping a chimpanzee in your house already a pretty questionable idea? I always assumed a chimp was perfectly capable of tearing somebody's face off without contracting a deadly disease first. Not according to this movie.
Anyway, once Ben starts attacking people, our characters find themselves trapped in the family's swimming pool, where they're relatively safe because Ben can't swim. He can speak sign language but he can’t swim. The problem is that they can't stay in the pool forever, and Ben is waiting for them to come out.
And that's pretty much the movie.
I don't necessarily need a horror movie to have an elaborate plot, but I do like it when things happen. PRIMATE gets its characters into one predicament fairly quickly and then leaves them there for most of the running time. It's not one damn thing after another. It's just one damn thing. The characters make occasional attempts to escape, Ben attacks somebody, and then we're back to waiting around the pool again. At least Jess Alexander, who plays one of the friends, is nice to look at.
The gore effects are impressive, and the chimpanzee itself is pretty convincing. There are moments when the violence is so over-the-top that the movie briefly delivers the outrageous entertainment I was hoping for.
But those moments are too few and far between. This flick’s a lot less fun than a movie about a homicidal chimpanzee has any right to be.
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