Primate
It hasn’t been an easy few years for Lucy Pinborough and her younger sister Erin, the death of their mother, a linguistics professor who worked with Ben, the chimpanzee who still lives with the family in an enclosure outside the house and successfully taught him how to communicate, and their father an author, communicating with the world through the written word and his children by sign language.
Lucy returning to Hawaii on a break from university with her friends Kate and Nick, with frenemy Hannah uninvited but in tow, Adam is away on the Silent Death book tour with his publicist, anxious about the possibility of landing a television deal, but unbeknownst to all Ben has been bitten and infected with rabies, escaping from his enclosure and experiencing the onset of symptoms, rage and hydrophobia.
Directed by The Other Side of the Door’s Johannes Roberts from a script co-written with Ernest Riera, Primate is more akin to his shark horror 47 Metres Down, a dangerous animal and the only route to escape it cut off, his ensemble cast attractive and carefree until the monkey is set free to wreak havoc in their remote designer home with glass walls and a pool grotto opening directly onto a cliff face with no guard rail.
Adam (Troy Kotsur) presumably worried about money having bribed the architect to overlook the health and safety concerns about the luxury house, far beyond the expected means of a researcher or writer, similarly lax about protocol is the vet who left Ben’s cage unlocked when checking on him following concerns, as are Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) and her cohort, eager to party the moment daddy is gone and invite over horny strangers they met at the airport.
Their lack of poor judgement extending to each of them when taking on Ben (movement specialist Miguel Torres Umba in convincing costume and prosthetics) one at a time rather than overwhelming him with strength of numbers, pulling him into the pool to drown him, that advantage is swiftly lost as Nick (Benjamin Cheng) is thrown face-first down the cliff, nor is there an inclination to hold onto weapons or follow through once a single blow has been struck, retreating rather than pushing any advantage.
Following in the footprints of The Murders at the Rue Morgue, Link and Monkey Shines, while Adrian Johnston’s soundtrack channels Dario Argento‘s Goblin to warn of the coming danger where those works tried to enhance the antagonist through training or intervention, Primate is heavy-browed monkey business, Ben “part of the family” but other than a Speak & Spell vocaliser offering a repertoire of basic threats an animal displaying rabid animal behaviour, a closer cousin to man than Cujo perhaps but no more interesting for it.
Primate is currently on general release
