Primate (United States, 2025)

Every horror fan deserves the occasional (decent) fix, and in the midst of one of the bleakest movie months of the year, Primate delivers. There’s nothing terribly original about Johannes Roberts’ rabid chimpanzee tale, but that’s kind of the point. He knows the tropes, adheres to them lovingly without going the comedy/parody route, and delivers a movie that mostly does what it sets out to do. It is a functional genre machine built specifically for a target audience. 

The frequent call-outs to John Carpenter’s fare are surely not accidental; Roberts very clearly wants us to think of Halloween. (Adrian Murphy’s score really should co-credit Carpenter; it’s a few notes short of a direct copy of the iconic 1978 film’s music, pulsing with that familiar, stalking synth dread.) Primate shares an almost-identical running time with Halloween: an hour and a half. One of the biggest differentiators—aside from the homicidal maniac being a chimp rather than a guy in a painted-over Captain Kirk mask—is that Carpenter used the set-up phase of his movie to effectively sketch in the details of his characters. Roberts tries that with significantly less success. 

The "getting-to-know-you" segments are choppy and seem like they left a lot on the cutting room floor. Consequently, the lack of organic suspense in the early going requires Primate to open with a flash-forward to offer a helping of gore before 20 minutes of more sedate story building. It’s a bit of a cheap tactic to grab attention, but it ensures the audience doesn’t check out before the real carnage begins. 

The horror elements are well-done, relying more on sustained tension than jump-scares. Roberts doesn’t completely ignore the latter device—after all, it’s baked into the genre—but he’s more interested in suspense than shocks. There’s plenty of gore, most of which involves faces being ripped apart. Although CGI was used for some aspects of the production, most of the blood and viscera comes courtesy of old-fashioned "practical effects." For the veteran horror fan, it offers a warm and cozy feeling. 

The lead character is Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), a young woman who’s a little on the shy side, unable to express her attraction for her crush, Nick (Benjamin Cheng). She and two of her twenty-something friends—longtime BFF Kate (Victoria Wyant) and verbal sparring partner Hannah (Jessica Alexander)—are spending a vacation at the isolated home of Lucy’s wealthy dad, Adam (Troy Kotsur). Also living there are Lucy’s younger sister, Erin (Gia Hunter), and Ben, the family’s most unusual member: a chimp adopted by Lucy’s now-deceased mother, a linguist. Ben is more than just an atypical pet, but when he is bitten by a rabid mongoose, the changes are rapid and terrifying. 

Of course, the "rabies" in this movie is only tangentially related to the rabies one sometimes encounters in animals. This particular variant of the disease manifests almost instantaneously, progresses quickly, and confers enormous strength. Ben is a genuinely frightening creature. Through a combination of actor Miguel Torres Umba's efforts, prosthetics, animatronics, and some low-key CGI, Ben is an effective villain. (In close-ups, he bears a striking resemblance to the Rick Baker King Kong from the 1976 movie.) 

The movie has a sense of humor, but it’s generally low-key; Roberts has fun including all the horror clichés even as he plays it straight with most of them. As I mentioned earlier, this is much more of a straightforward horror film than a "hip" horror/comedy. And, although the modeling after Halloween is evident, the film feels more like a faint echo than a full-throated homage. This film’s big suspense sequence, which involves an infinity pool, doesn’t have nearly the white-knuckle power of Laurie’s attempts to get into the locked house. Furthermore, the most direct steal, which involves a closet with bi-fold louvered doors, doesn’t work nearly as well here. 

Still, almost any horror film will come up short when compared to Halloween, so Primate’s inability to match the classic shouldn’t be seen as a major slight. This is a solid horror film that delivers pretty much everything a fan could want or expect (especially considering that it’s January). It doesn’t feel fresh, but neither is it stale. Despite the very modern setting, the throwback elements are by far the most welcome aspects being offered, proving that sometimes, sticking to the basics is the smartest move a director can make.

Primate (United States, 2025)