Primate (2025)
Primate opens with a fantastic kill and early warning that in no way is this chimpanzee to be trusted, but if you didn’t know that chimps will rip your face off then that’s on you. Don’t find out the hard way. Anyway, a promising opening to a film I was excited for.
Very quickly though, Primate peters into establishing some interchangeable stock characters/victims who I give less of a shit about than, well, than my last shit, or the hurty one I know is coming after that madras. Like any good horror film, the anticipation of that porcelain murder is fearful.
That bland, standard slasher plot is par for the course in a bog standard horror, but I was hoping for more. God knows why. For some reason I was reminded of Splice, which is a good example of elevation of a creature feature to genuinely novel levels, but I’d need to revisit it.
Pets are expensive and I can only imagine how much it costs to keep a primate, though feeding it your annoying hipster mates must keep costs down. The film would be more believable and scary if they just made Chimp Crazy into a House of 1000 Corpses style bonkers trip into a madness of humans, trippy, terrifying journey into the psyche of humanity.
Would that be derivative? No more so than Primate overall and specifically its rip-off Halloween score. Was I disappointed with Primate? Yes with what I went in with but not after the first fifteen minutes.
Primate is a paint by bloody numbers creature feature, where there was so much opportunity to do more and I’d hoped for more from Director Johannes Roberts, who did a stellar job revamping the Resident Evil series. 5/10
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