"Primate" Review

January is traditionally a dumping ground for movies studios have little faith in and horror programmers. Sometimes you get a gem like M3GAN, more more often it's schlock like Primate which has a lean premise undercut by cheap execution.

Oddly-named Johnny Sequoyah stars as Lucy Pinborough, a young woman returning to her family's home in Hawaii after an indeterminate lengthy time away. She's accompanied by her bestie, Kate (Victoria Wyant), and Hannah (Jessica Alexander), a frenemy of Lucy's who Kate invited along for some reason.

The family home is a gorgeous cliffside spread where live her deaf author father, Adam (Troy Kotsur), younger sister Erin (Gia Hunter), and Ben (Miguel Torres Umba), a chimpanzee that her late linguist mother had trained to communicate with an electronic pad. Unfortunately, Ben has contracted rabies and escaped his enclosure while Adam is away on a book signing. He bites Erin, and the group retreat to the pool because chimps can't swim. But even in the pool, they're not entirely safe and with Erin's injuries, they're going to have to find away up to the house where their phones are charging.

The scenario is novel in that the pool is accessible only via a spiral staircase so they can't see if Ben is lurking on the deck level or in the house and the infinity pool construction overlooks a sheer cliff face so they can't escape that way. But pretty much every kill is predictable as well as who will survive due to plot armor.

There are two major issues which sink Primate from the general "not great, but fun enough" review consensus it enjoys. First, Ben's rabies is graphically illustrated in the cold open meaning we know he's a problem and have to wade through a first act of family drama and teen partying before the Bad Monkey Hour begins as it jumps back 36 hours to show Lucy and friends boarding the plane and to set up a couple of party bros who will show up later to die. (SPOILER ALERT!)

Even more problematic is the execution of Ben with a performer in a monkey costume and an animatronic head. We've had four Planet of the Apes movies in the past 15 years, each pushing the realism of CGI-enhanced performance capture forward with even greater realism, so to present something where Ben looks more primitive than the makeup in the 1968 original is fatally foolhardy. They try to hide Ben with dark lighting, various obstructions between him and the camera, even just putting him way out of focus in the background of a poorly composed shot, indicating they knew it wasn't working out. As mediocre as Tim Burton's 2001 Planet of the Apes was, the makeup was impeachable.

Granted, they didn't have the budget for Weta Digital to create Ben, but with a reported $21-24M budget, there's not only no excuse for such poor quality of THE key character execution, but it raises the question of WHAT they spent that much money on? Reportedly filmed on London soundstages, it's basically the pool and house sets. I don't know anyone in the cast but Kotsur - if there's a deaf guy in a movie these days, he's the one, same as Peter Dinklage gets all the short guy parts - and one of the girls is currently on Ryan Murphy's current weird series, The Beauty, so it's not like they paid Big Star salaries.

While a couple of the kills are respectably gnarly, the overall movie simply isn't worth the brief 90-minute runtime.

Score: 3/10. Skip it.