It’s kind of wild that a film like this hasn’t been made already. Maybe just because the technology hasn’t fully been there, but that typically hasn’t stopped them before. That being said, the performance of Ben, the monkey in the film, is performed by an actor and is made of mostly practical effects, prosthetics and puppetry, likely with a layer of CGI touch up. Or maybe they just wanted to capitalise on one scene from Nope.

When Lucy (Johnny Seqouyah) returns home with a couple of friends, they are left alone with her sister and the family’s pet monkey, Ben. When Ben is bitten by a Mongoose, rabies takes over and Ben loses all sense of his loyalties and starts brutally attacking the group of friends.

This film is not much more than a slasher film but instead of being a masked, crazy killer, it’s a monkey that has rabies. The film clocks in just under 90 minutes, and is such an easy watch, and it’s absolutely the sort of film where you just switch off your brain and let it happen, because if you start to think about it then you’ll notice things like how little noise Ben makes just walking around and moving about the house.

The cast don’t bring anything special to the table, but do the job needed of them. Aside from the film has Academy Award winner, Troy Kotsur, who is a deaf actor and won his award for a supporting role in Coda just a couple of years ago. He spends a lot of the film out of the house, but I felt the moments he is on screen is the most engaging, and by far the best performer in the film. The only other performer who deserves a shout-out is Miguel Torres Umba who is the man under the prosthetics and costume that plays Ben.

With an 18 rating, I was expecting the film to have a lot of blood and gory moments during the kills, something which I certainly expected to continue after the first one is quite brutal. However, it is a mixed bag of some very gory moments, to others that you barely see and feel underwhelming. The actual scare moments are predictable, but the use and threat of the monkey makes it have more of an impact.

Primate is a simple horror that’s entertaining and provides cheap scares, mixed with moments of gore, even if simple logic rules don’t seem to apply. There’s a market for these kind of films, especially in the horror genre, that help them do well at the box office and once again on streaming. There’s unlikely enough to turn this into a cheap franchise, not a good one anyway.

What did you think of Primate?

Let me know your thoughts on the film, and be sure to check out my other recent reviews of Iron Lung and Send Help. And to not miss the rest of my reviews be sure to follow @floodersfilms on social media or follow via the buttons below.

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