There’s an atavistic joy to be had in the January slasher—the kind of no-frills, all-chills gorefest that often comes around in the sleepy opening weeks of the year, when all the awards bait has exited theaters and audiences are starved for some empty calories. “Primate,” the latest from Johannes Roberts (“Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City“), is precisely that: lean, mean, and chimpanzee-n. It gets you in and out of the theater in less than 90 minutes, squirming in your seat and yelling at the screen. It’s a flimsy series of contrivances to get a shockingly realistic ape to rip the faces off of stupid human beings in increasingly creative ways. What more do you want, really?
The titular primate, of course, is Ben, played not by Robbie Williams but movement specialist Miguel Torres Umba—who, with the aid of some prosthetics, puppetry, and startlingly invisible CGI, lends us a creature whose menace is occasionally undercut with flickers of deceptive humanity. He’s not some violent beast who wanders in from the forest; he’s the beloved adopted pet of Adam (Troy Kotsur), a successful author whose books (which all grimly feature the word “Silent” in the title, considering Adam, like Kotsur, is Deaf) have earned him a million-dollar cliffside mansion off the coast of a Hawaiian island. Keeping Ben around allows Adam and his family, including daughters Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) and Erin (Gia Hunter), to stay connected to their late matriarch, a linguist who adopted Ben and taught him sign language.
He’s a beloved member of the family, though that relationship gets, let’s say, tested when Ben is bitten by a rabid mongoose while Adam is away at a book signing, leaving a recently returned Lucy, Erin, and some of Lucy’s friends alone at home. Rabies sets in, his mouth foams, and the sight of water suddenly turns him crazy; by the half-hour mark, all these kids are fighting for their lives. Their only refuge is the house’s cliffside pool, since Ben can’t swim (and hydrophobes are notoriously afraid of water), leaving them literally trapped between a rock and a hard place. From there, they’ve got to figure out how to escape or call for help before Ben can figure out a way to sneak around and kill them all.
“Primate” clocks in at a swift 89 minutes, and Roberts wastes little time setting up the stakes and getting to his premise. (For those worried they’ll have to wait to see a chimp rip someone’s face off, fear not; a flash-forward cold open gives you a taste of the goods before we have to eat our plot veggies.) Granted, the script gives very little dimension to Ben’s slate of soon-to-be-Slim-Jims; Sequoyah gives a kind of pre-fame Brie Larson laconicism to Lucy, but the rest are disposable hardbodies designed to be bitten, disemboweled, and ripped apart by Ben’s strong limbs—all practical gore that, like Ben himself, is the real reason to buy your ticket.
The rest of the crew is hardly noteworthy, consisting mainly of the innocent, largely sidelined Erin and a trio of interchangeably leggy college students who take turns strategically leaving the pool to find one of several charging cell phones littered throughout the house in a vain search for help. (Some other victims drop by in the film’s even gnarlier final act, in case we needed some fresh meat for Ben to rip apart indiscriminately.) But Roberts and cinematographer Stephen Murphy find plenty of ways to play with space, geography, and lighting in inventive yet largely unshowy ways, keeping Ben just out of frame enough to make his appearance a genuine fright.
Between “Raccoon City” and this, it’s clear Roberts is a devotee of John Carpenter (Adrian Johnston’s syrupy synth score is a clear homage to those works; this is basically a hirsute “Halloween,” right down to teen girls hiding from the baddie in a closet), though obviously this lacks those films’ surprising sophistication or deceptively political undertones. Here, the closest we get to sophistication is some pablum about grief that doesn’t get explored much, or the strange ways in which Umba’s performance and the ape effects occasionally let us struggle with Ben’s rabid turmoil. Lucy et al. keep hoping to find flashes of the old Ben still in there, and there’s an innate tragedy to the whole situation. What if Michael Myers was just…sick? But Roberts and co-writer Ernest Riera seem content to just say that rabies turns you evil (and, apparently, a master manipulator with enough cunning to lay traps or play sadistically with your food). A smarter script would have done more with it, but maybe it’d also be a bit less fun.
It’s tempting to knock “Primate” for its dumb characters and contrived plotting, and for the various hoops it throws its characters through to get to the goods. And make no mistake, this script and its inhabitants are rock stupid, to the point where you might want to yell warnings at the screen. It’s an instinct that, frankly, I don’t get; don’t you want these people to get killed off in increasingly grotty ways? Isn’t that why Nicole Kidman brought us to the movies? After all, face-ripping feels good in a place like this.
