Primate Review: Murder Monkey Movie Fun. Murder Monkey Movie Big and Stupid. Murder Monkey Movie Bloody Good Time.

4 days ago 9

Gregory Nussen is the Lead Film Critic for Screen Rant. They have previously written for Deadline Hollywood, Slant Magazine, Backstage and Salon. Other bylines: In Review Online, Vague Visages, Bright Lights Film Journal, The Servant, The Harbour Journal, Boing Boing Knock-LA & IfNotNow's Medium. They were the recipient of the 2022 New York Film Critics Circle Graduate Prize in Criticism, and are a proud member of GALECA, the Society of LGBTQ Entertainment Critics. They co-host the Great British Baking Podcast. Gregory also has a robust performance career: their most recent solo performance, QFWFQ, was nominated for five awards, winning Best Solo Theatre at the Hollywood Fringe Festival in 2025.

Primate is a genuine throwback. A bonafide creature feature of the same ridiculous ilk that once birthed Deep Blue Sea or, perhaps more relevant, Cujo, Johannes Roberts' gory exploitation is about as big and as stupid as you can get. Which is to say, it's exactly what it needs to be: tense, fun and thoroughly incredulous. In the most complimentary way, welcome back to the January studio horror.

If you've seen the trailers, you know what to expect. But that's not a bad thing. It's good to be surprised in a movie theater, but when the fare is about a murderous rabid monkey, you kind of just want to see brainless rich kids act moronically and revel in the fountains of blood that spurt out when their heads get ripped off. On multiple occasions, someone in the theater where I screened the film, in enthusiastic approval of the titular primate's murder spree yelled out, "GET 'EM BEN!" So, that's what it is. A cinematic coliseum of horror.

Primate Understands Well How To Exploit Its B-Movie Trappings

The plot, such that it matters, centers around Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), a college kid returning home to Hawaii after a long time away. Her mother has died of cancer, leaving her younger sister, Erin (Gia Hunter), alone with their workaholic primatologist father, Adam (CODA's Troy Kotsur). Along in tow is Lucy's best friend Katie (Victoria Wyant), Katie's brother Nick (Benjamin Cheng), and friend Hannah (Jessica Alexander), whom Lucy hates for reasons never quite explained. With respect to all of the fine actors here, none of them are written with any distinguishing characteristics. It's more or less just a game of figuring out who is hornier than the other.

Oh, and then there's Ben, their exceptionally advanced primate pet, performed in an extremely convincing bodysuit by theater movement director Miguel Hernando Torres Umba, easily the film's star beneath the makeup. Blink and you'll miss it in the open credits, but the implication seems to be that Lucy's late mother trained Ben to communicate at a level previously unheard of, even for chimpanzees. Because Adam is deaf, the family speaks mostly in sign language, which Ben seems to understand really well — plus, he has an iPad with pre-recorded words and phrases which he uses to tell Lucy he's glad to see her home, and that he missed her.

The cold open of the film is a wildly violent death scene, before Roberts and co-writer Ernest Riera flashback thirty-six hours. The film then proceeds very normally, except we are aware of what Ben is capable of doing, and so the first act has a palpable unnerving tension underneath the shots of young twenty-somethings getting drunk and swimming in a fabulous pool on the edge of a cliff. It's a simple editing choice that paves a frothy path.

That relative normalcy is disrupted when Adam finds a mutilated mongoose inside Ben's enclosure and decides to keep him locked in a cage until they can determine whether he has contracted something or not. But, as previously communicated in clunky exposition, Adam has to go. A film studio is interested in buying the rights to his book, and he has a signing in town, and so he leaves — even though his daughter has just come home, even though his monkey may have rabies. This is the first of many moments that defy rational thinking, and if there's one thing that Roberts and Riera push their luck on, it's in the incessant stream of absurd choices their characters make.

To cut to the quick: Ben does have rabies, and he pretty easily escapes his confines before going on the warpath to shed as much blood as he possibly can. First, he chomps down hard on Erin's leg, and so the kids barricade themselves inside the pool, because Ben can't swim. From thereon out, Primate turns into a game of chicken where each character tries their hand at getting to a cell phone to call 911, most of whom fail, marvelously.

Not that you needed to read this to know it to be true, but the filmmakers really stretch the limits of the possibility of an infectious disease on a primate. Ben's wild aggression is one thing, but it's a bit bizarre the way he also seemingly gets smarter, stalking the grounds of this mansion like his Michael Myers.

Speaking of which, when the film is at its best, it does recall John Carpenter's early work in increasingly pleasant ways. Adrian Johnston's synth score is reminiscent of the maestro's musical work, and Roberts gives us a number of frightening POV shots of the monkey on the prowl. Primate, when it works, is like a home invasion stalk and slash with a monkey as its sociopathic killer. And, to Roberts' credit, the body count is kept at a minimal, yet brutal level; when the bodies do fall, they fall spectacularly.

Enjoyment of Primate depends on how far you're willing to suspend disbelief. Yes, this is a smart chimp, but how is he also somehow aware of sadistic forms of torture, or mockery? Oddly enough, the film is probably not animalistic enough. Primate is most fun when Ben is a rapidly deteriorating murder machine, less fun when it tries to sell the idea that this creature has human inclinations of revenge. But, overall, the pulpier and the dumber it gets, Primate provides a pretty good reason to get to the theater in January. And, it gets pretty pulpy and dumb indeed.