Primate (2025)
From its predictably, suitably gory jolt of an opening sequence, Paramount's new creature feature Primate announces it means (monkey) business.
The titular "primate" is Ben, the pet chimpanzee of a well-to-do family living in the hills of Hawaii. The movie picks up with Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), a young college student, returning home for the summer with two friends in tow. We learn that Lucy's mother, a linguist who originally brought Ben into the family, has recently died of cancer, leaving Lucy and her younger sister Erin (Gia Hunter) in the care of their well-meaning but career-focused father Adam. In one of the movie's surprising albeit underdeveloped strokes, Adam is played by Oscar winner Troy Kotsur as a successful deaf author.
Once the initial glow of homecoming and the golden-hued, sun-lit beauty of Hawaii slowly fades to dusk, it becomes clear that something is not quite right with Ben. And so, the movie's bloody mayhem unfolds.
Primate does harken back to the lean, mean creature flicks of the '70s and '80s à la Alligator (1980) and Cujo (1983). But perhaps most surprisingly, it often feels like a direct take-off of 1978's Halloween, from the 70s-inflected score to recreating almost entire set pieces—one sequence, involving two of our young heroines trapped in a closet, feels like a near shot-for-shot homage to Jamie Lee Curtis fending off Michael Meyers from inside a closet in Halloween.
Ben, for his part, becomes a Meyers-esque figure by the end, a generically senseless boogeyman (but this time, he grunts), which is a bit of a shame because Primate has a good set-up and a firm grasp of its tone (it's played straight, though with tongue planted firmly in cheek).
How much you enjoy the film will likely depend on your tolerance for its exceedingly thin characterizations and frustrating moments of untapped potential (one scene, involving Kotsur's character being unable to hear the murderous mayhem occurring just off-camera, feels maddeningly underexplored). But if gory, stylish thrills are what you're after, you could do a whole lot worse than Primate.
