Going Apeshit
ONe part creature feature, one part survival horror, all bananas in the best way.
Primate
Director: Johannes Roberts • Writers: Johannes Roberts, Ernest Riera
Starring: Johnny Sequoyah, Jessica Alexander, Gia Hunter, Victoria Wyant, Troy Kotsur
USA • 1hr 29mins
Opens Hong Kong January 22 • III
Grade: B+
You know how when you go see a movie where a wild animal goes bonkers and then on a murder streak, how you usually wind up rooting for the wild animal? Or maybe the creature in a more standard monster movie (hashtag Team Godzilla every time)? Didn’t you kind of hope Jaws (okay, Bruce) would win the day in Jaws, just a litte bit? Or the lion in Beast, who was just pissed at poachers killing his family, as we all should be? It was great fun, but I had to side with the grey wolf in The Grey. Sorry, Liam, you in his ’hood. No? Just me then?
Whatever your feelings, movies like Johannes Roberts’s Primate are precision engineered to make you feel next to nothing when the homicidal animal starts picking off trekkers/vacationers/hunters/surfers in creative, juicy and bloody ways in whatever contrived space the action is set in, much to the merriment of viewers with a fondness for this kind of mid-winter trifle. Some work better than others, and while Primate doesn’t hit the crazy heights of the idiot partiers in Shark Bait (that shark was done dirty), it has a nice mix of douche-bro monkey bait and surprisingly resilient Final Girls for a solid B-movie good time. There’s no interrogation of human-animal relations, laboratory ethics vis-à-vis animal testing or the nuances of having exotic pets. No, no, Roberts and his regular writer Ernest Riera (who also wrote the Spanish survival thriller Nowhere) tap their horror-thriller bona fides to exploit dark corners (The Strangers: Prey at Night), negative space and lurking natural world threats (47 Meters Down) to maximum effect for an efficient, suitably brutal bit of old school monstering. No muss, no fuss.
Could literally be one person
It helps a great deal that Roberts opted for a mixture of prosthetics and makeup, and animatronics and puppetry (by Neil Gorton and Kate Walshe) to go along with a good old fashioned dude in a furry costume (Miguel Torres Umba in a tremendous physical performance) over CGI, motion capture and (gulp) AI to create Ben, the primate of the title. Primate’s appropriately feral, almost tactile tone makes a huge difference to how easily Roberts ratchets up the tension and makes the situation feel truly dire. With good kills.
Said situation is summer holidays at the palatial, Hawaiian hillside home of college student Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), which she knows is going to be all sorts of awkward. She hasn’t been home in ages, not since her linguist mother died and left her little sister Erin (Gia Hunter) and novelist dad Adam (Troy Kotsur, who, by the way is a damned Oscar winner) pretty much alone. She shows up with her bestie Kate (Victoria Wyant) and her frenemy Hannah (Jessica Alexander), who Kate invited – unasked – and who we have no idea what their problem with each other is. Suffice it to say, they get to the ridiculously chic, jungle-bound house and Hannah starts acting like she owns the place and all weird around Adam, who’s deaf, and seriously why is she here? Oh wait. To flirt and make out with Lucy’s lifelong friend Nick (Benjamin Cheng) who she has an unrequited crush on. Then Hannah meets Ben, a chimpanzee that lives with the family and was one of Lucy’s mom’s language experiments. He uses an iPad to communicate sometimes. He’s harmless and kinda cute. Little does anyone realise it but he was also bitten by a mongoose. He’s on the verge of going rabid. Uh oh.
Now, it should be noted that all these people, largely the four young women who wind up hiding from the funky monkey in the pool, are precisely the cookie-cutter archetypes no one can tell apart (wait, one has dark brown hair), created purely to be mangled and mauled. Hannah is a… bitch? Kate is a… mediator? Erin is a… bit younger? Who knows? Who cares? The point is to position them – and the ideally named douche-bros Drew and Brad (Charlie Mann and Tienne Simon) Hannah picks up on the plane (because of course) and who let themselves into a stranger’s home – in various parts of the house and behind various obstacles so that Ben can toss them off cliffs, bludgeon them, tear them apart (oh, Drew you poor thing) and otherwise terrorise them until Adam comes to the rescue. We know where this is going the minute it starts, and that’s okay. Primate does too, and rather than try and reinvent the wheel it leans into its creepy spaces, nicely shot by DOP Stephen Murphy (Heart Eyes) to be both aspirational and sinister, and makes the most of framing Ben through glass and water and fabrics to keeps us guessing about what’s on his mind. And yes, you can see it. A sequence with Adam looking around the unnervingly still house is especially tense by taking away the sound to heighten Adam’s POV. Did I want the chimp to win in the end? Hard to say, but either way I felt more sympathy for him than for the idiot humans he has to put up with. Knock first, you dicks. Even if you were invited.