6 Cheesy Monkey Movies To Watch Before 'Primate'

Hollywood knows how to make a cute and cuddly chimpanzee into a deadly force of nature. Johannes Roberts’s upcoming horror film Primate continues with the tradition of the lovable pet from hell while having just enough dark humor to keep audiences entertained. Holding a 91% critics' score on Rotten Tomatoes, Primate appears to succeed where other bad monkey movies fell short.

Looking back at Hollywood’s obsession with chimps on a rampage, the following movies in this article are ranked as the most cheesy monkey movies you must see before checking out Primate. Some of these pictures fall outside the horror genre, while others you may disagree with being bad. However, each of these films left a lasting impression on moviegoers for better and for worse.

6 ‘King Kong’ (2005)

Peter Jackson’s reimagining of the 1933 classic was an overly ambitious spectacle. While most recent Kong movies have been purely popcorn entertainment, King Kong wears its heart on its sleeve, with an excessive running time mostly padded by long, emotional sequences featuring the 25-foot-tall ape and the beautiful vaudeville actress Ann Darrow (Naomi Watts). Those sentimental moments are meshed with CGI-heavy sequences of the human film crew on Skull Island running from vicious dinosaur rejects out of Jurassic Park and man-eating giant insects.

Despite its overstuffed scale, King Kong is clearly made from a place of love by Jackson. Kong himself is more than a piece of CGI. The casting of Andy Serkis, who performs the motion capture for the title character, brings a touch of humanity that was lacking in the 1933 film and the 1976 remake. Even the performances of Watts, Jack Black as opportunistic filmmaker Carl Denham, and Adrien Brody as the sympathetic screenwriter all turn in admirable work fitting for the ‘30s period setting. It should not be truly considered a cheesy movie. Yet, its excessiveness in the fantasy adventure realm where Jackson normally thrives, falls short of being a true cinematic masterpiece.

5 ‘Link’ (1986)

Hailing from the legendary Cannon Films, home of various over-the-top Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson action programmers, Link comes from Alfred Hitchcock apprentice Richard Franklin (Psycho II), featuring highly intelligent chimps terrorizing Elizabeth Shue’s zoology student and friends in the late Terence Stamp’s English Coast mansion. If a similar smart-chimp movie like Project X is likened to E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial, Link is essentially Jaws. But for a Cannon Film, Franklin’s bloodless direction makes Link feel more like Oscar bait than a guilty pleasure B-movie, which results in some unintentional laughs.

Link’s absurd nature extends to having the prestige of Stamp portraying the distinguished anthropologist experimenting with the chimps. His attempt to subdue the smart monkeys in one scene is played so seriously that Jerry Goldsmith’s underlying synth score has to heighten the carnival-like madness. Link is the rare case of a horror film leaning heavily on the intelligent thriller side, down to its title character looking menacing in a butler suit.

4 ‘Monkey Shines’ (1988)

Iconic Night of the Living Dead creator George A. Romero took a detour from zombies to explore the unusual bond between man and chimp. Unlike the intentional earnestness of Link, Monkey Shines embraces its B-movie tropes. Based on the 1985 novel by Michael Stewart, Monkey Shines follows quadriplegic law student Allan Mann (Jason Beghe), who is gifted by his scientist pal Geoffrey (John Pankow) a Capuchin monkey named Ella to support him at home. But this is no ordinary monkey, however, as Geoffrey has been experimenting with an intelligence serum on Ella that violently acts out the mental aggression Allan feels from being wheelchair-bound. Because of everyone bringing great strain on Allan’s life, Ella makes them her victims.

Part Carrie and part Coming Home, Monkey Shines is a total unhinged revenge fantasy of a man using a chimp as a weapon. There is little social commentary in Romero’s work this time around as it focuses on man’s suppressed rage. It is pure psychic mayhem filled with wild deaths ranging from an unknown Stanley Tucci burned in a cabin to the monkey killing Allan’s mother by dropping a hairdryer in the bathtub. Monkey Shines drew controversy upon release when the Adapting Society (ADAPT) complained about the film’s memorable poster of a toy monkey sitting in a wheelchair. The image alone is just as unnerving as the movie itself.

3 ‘Planet of the Apes’ (2001)

On paper, Tim Burton’s Planet of the Apes has all the makings of a guaranteed blockbuster hit: The revival of the iconic 1968 film had the director of Batman at the helm. Its lead actor, Mark Wahlberg, was the hottest star at the dawn of the new millennium. With the addition of heavyweights such as Tim Roth, Helena Bonham Carter, and legendary prosthetic makeup artist Rick Baker, Planet of the Apes should have been the beginning of a new era for the franchise. But it did not.

While having some fantastic ape makeup and fantastic costume design, the 2001 Apes lacked the gothic flavor that Burton was known for, becoming just another slick, uninspired Hollywood remake that follows identical beats of the original. Wahlberg lacks the leading man charisma of Charlton Heston, the apes’ portrayal varies from Shakespearean to flat-out Saturday morning goofiness, and the additional human roles, which include model Estella Warren, have virtually nothing to do but stand around scantily clad. Where the original featured a jaw-dropping twist ending that audiences still discuss today, the infamous final scene in this remake was nowhere near brilliant. It would take another decade before Fox recalibrated the franchise in a far superior direction with Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

2 ‘Congo’ (1995)

Piggybacking on the groundbreaking success of Jurassic Park, Congo was another Michael Crichton adaptation that Hollywood hoped to make apes cool again, just like Spielberg did for the dinosaurs. The addition of Spielberg’s longtime producer Frank Marshall to the director’s chair appeared to be one sense of comfort going into this film, along with the late Stan Winston handling the gorilla suits. The end result was an oddly toned pulp action-adventure film with special effects lacking the wow factor of the dinosaur movie.

Congo struggles with an identity crisis right from the start. Its opening sequence features Evil Dead’s Bruce Campbell getting the Psycho treatment as the first victim of the killer gorillas. This is followed by Laura Linney in her first leading role as ex-CIA girlfriend of Campbell, taking part in an expedition into the African jungle alongside a pair of primatologists and a digitized talking gorilla named Amy, who does sign language. Though intended to be a deadly threat, the gorillas end up photographed like animatronic theme park robots anytime they surround the human heroes. Additionally, Tim Curry turns in a mustache-twirling villain performance that could have been saved for a totally different movie. Congo’s only saving grace is a muscle-bound Ernie Hudson as the mercenary guide on the expedition. Sporting an African accent and proudly smoking cigars, Congo would have been better served as the Ghostbuster’s breakout starting role.

1 ‘The Monkey’ (2025)

While no real animals were front and center in Osgood Perkins’ comedic horror picture, The Monkey is a throwback to classic Stephen King. The cheesiness comes from the contrast between its grim cinematography and the inherently ridiculous threat: a mysterious toy monkey whose cymbal crashes trigger random, grotesque deaths. There is absolutely no subtlety here, with Perkins poking fun at death as simply a sudden happening rather than a tragedy.

What makes The Monkey memorable is how confidently it commits to inevitability. Once the rules are established, the film becomes a slow, dread-soaked countdown where suspense comes not from if something will happen, but how horribly. It embraces the nihilistic aspects of King’s novels about the randomness of death, no matter what one has done with their life. Though the dark humor is often unsettling when it comes to the gore factor, The Monkey embraces excess cheese with a wide-open grin.