TL;DR: A rabid chimp goes feral in a luxury home, and the result is messy, mean, and oddly effective B-movie horror that knows you’re laughing and bleeding at the same time.

There’s a specific kind of movie premise that immediately tells you whether you’re in on the joke or about to have a very long night. Primate is absolutely one of those. A pet chimp contracts rabies and turns a luxury home into a slaughterhouse. That’s it. That’s the pitch. No metaphors you need to unlock, no prestige aspirations pretending this is something it’s not. And honestly? I kind of admire the honesty. In a cinematic landscape addicted to self-serious horror allegories, Primate just looks you dead in the eye and says: what if the family chimp went absolutely feral.

Directed by Johannes Roberts, Primate opens with a grave, vaguely educational title card about hydrophobia that sounds scientific enough to make you nod along before realizing it’s mostly nonsense. Rabies is not a psychological condition, but the film doesn’t really care, and neither should you. This is the moment you either lean back and let the madness wash over you or start nitpicking and miss the fun entirely. I chose the former, and the movie rewarded me with some genuinely demented entertainment.

The setup is almost aggressively wholesome at first. We’re dropped into a gorgeous cliffside mansion in Hawaii, where college-age Lucy has come home to reconnect with her teenage sister Erin and their father Adam, a successful crime novelist who is also deaf. Adam is played by Troy Kotsur, and every scene he’s in carries a warmth the movie probably doesn’t deserve but absolutely benefits from. The family is still reeling from the recent death of the mother, and there’s a quiet, lived-in tenderness to the early scenes that makes what follows feel just a little more wrong.

And then there’s Ben, the chimp. He wears a red shirt. He hugs a teddy bear. He communicates through a digital keypad, tapping out simple, heartbreakingly earnest phrases. For a brief stretch, Primate almost convinces you it’s a quirky domestic drama with a weird animal companion. This is the movie’s smartest trick. Ben isn’t treated like a monster-in-waiting. He’s treated like a real animal. A strange, intelligent, unsettling animal, but still a living creature with habits and routines and attachments.

That realism is exactly what makes the turn so nasty. Once Ben contracts rabies after an offscreen animal encounter, the movie wastes little time ripping away the comforting illusion. He doesn’t become supernatural. He doesn’t grow fangs or mutate into a CGI nightmare. He just becomes faster, angrier, and terrifyingly efficient. When the violence starts, it’s abrupt and ugly, and it escalates with shocking speed.

Most of the carnage is contained within the house and its surrounding pool area, turning the film into a sweaty siege movie where water is safety and dry land is death. The set-up is simple but effective, especially when the chimp’s physicality comes into play. Ben, brought to life through practical effects and a committed performance by Miguel Torres Umba, is genuinely unsettling. The facial expressions are just expressive enough to register emotion without tipping into cartoonishness, and the way he moves feels wrong in a way that taps directly into our lizard brains.

What makes Ben work as a slasher figure is that he’s not evil. He’s closer to the shark in Jaws or the dog in Cujo than to any masked killer with lore and mythology. He’s instinct, muscle, and rage, unleashed in an environment that was never built to contain him. Watching him tear through humans in swimwear isn’t frightening because he’s demonic; it’s frightening because it feels plausible in a deeply uncomfortable way. Chimps are strong. Horrifyingly strong. Primate never lets you forget that.

The film knows exactly what it is, and it leans into exploitation with a grin. The human characters, who initially seem like they might matter, are slowly reduced to screaming meat, and that reduction feels intentional. This is a movie less interested in survival arcs than in staging creative mayhem. One extended kill sequence involving a particularly obnoxious bro character is so mean-spirited and inventively cruel that it almost feels like a punchline delivered with a straight face.

There’s also an undeniable echo of the infamous chimp subplot from Jordan Peele’s Nope, except where that film used restraint and implication, Primate opts for full-throttle excess. Nothing is left to the imagination. Faces are mauled. Limbs are shredded. The camera does not blink. And yet, weirdly, it never feels sadistic in the way bad slashers do. There’s a wink beneath the gore, an understanding that this is cinematic junk food meant to be devoured, not analyzed to death.

Is Primate dumb? Absolutely. Is it sloppy with its science and blunt with its symbolism? Without question. But it’s also slickly made, efficiently paced, and far more effective than a movie about a rabid pet chimp has any right to be. It understands the primal thrill of watching order collapse under the weight of pure animal force, and it delivers that thrill with confidence and craft.

Verdict

Primate is shameless, ridiculous, and intermittently inspired exploitation horror that succeeds by refusing to pretend it’s anything else. It’s a chimpanzee slasher movie played straight enough to be disturbing and goofy enough to be fun, and sometimes that’s exactly what the genre needs.