Someone recently asked me about my “guilty pleasures”…what they are and why.  I suspect they were expecting me to mention some chick flick I secretly adored or a couple of cuts off the Journey’s Greatest Hits album that I couldn’t get enough of, because they seemed a bit surprised/uncomfortable/put-off with my actual response.  Lately, I’ve been deriding inordinate and likely perverse satisfaction from videos of idiots trying to take selfies with and/or pet and/or somehow intimately interact with wild animals/apex predators in the wild or in captivity, doesn’t matter.  These hopeless, phone-addicted dolts who haven’t touched grass in decades who deludedly think the world is here for them to judge and react to on YouTube or Reels so they can have content seem perfectly comfortable – entitled, even – approaching some gigantic beast on its home territory, where its family/pack lives, fully expecting this apex predator to just stand still and passively let some bipedal turd of a person get next to it, put his/her arm around it, and be involuntarily selfied.  And then they are shocked – shocked, dear reader – when they are immediately gored in the groin or bitten in the face.  These videos always seem to have some warning at the top about “graphic” or “violent” content, but I find these warnings childish, ridiculous, and pathetic.  Where others are apparently repulsed, I find great humor.  The truth is that when I watch these vids, I crack the fuck up.  Yesterday I blew a not-insignificant amount of Jack and Coke™ through my nose as I cackled like a bastard as I watched some ignorant ballbag climb into a European zoo enclosure and get brutally and unlubricatedly violated by a whole colony of purple-assed spider monkeys in estrus.  Where others see tragedy and violence, I simply see nature at work…Darwin taking out the trash.

Anyway, I guess I shouldn’t have been surprised when this same person I was talking with about guilty pleasures didn’t seem to interested in watching “Primate” with me.  Which was fine.  They didn’t miss much anyway.

“Primate” is basically a formulaic, trope-allegiant slasher movie, except instead of a homicidal maniac in a hockey mask, we get a rabid chimpanzee.  Which is, for all practical purposes, the same thing.

The movie opens with a very promising (albeit brief) foreshadowing of the aforementioned rabid chimp ripping a veterinarian’s face off.  Then, as per our usual arrangement with slasher tropes, we switch to a group of overly attractive, clueless, airheaded, entitled teens going home to Hawaii.  They’re not returning from a vacation in paradise – no – they already live there.  And not in some tropical hovel or hut…nope…a modern mansion at the edge of a ridiculous cliff, with an infinity pool going right to the edge of said cliff, which cliff then immediately drops off about 1000 feet directly into the Pacific.  Two minutes into this film and I cannot wait for Mr. Chimp to rip every one of these cast members limb from limb.

Things proceed predictably, which isn’t the worst thing, but some opportunities are missed.  But one can only have so many expectations of a movie about a rabid chimpanzee, I suppose.  I think the biggest disappointment for yrs. truly is that the screenwriter’s/filmmaker’s weakening of the chimp for the sake of a few scenes and plot points.  Here’s what I mean: an adult male chimpanzee is 4 to 6 times stronger than a human of the same size.  That means that a chimp’s strength is equivalent to that of 5 adult men.  So, if the chimp in “Primate” (he’s named Ben) – if Ben was truly rabid and on a killing spree, he would annihilate everyone within reach without exerting any serious effort.  Toward the end of the movie, there are several physical fights between various humans and Ben the rabid chimpanzee.  These are depicted as these sort of blow-by-blow, punch-counterpunch brawls that are disappointingly unrealistic.  At one point, Ben back-hands a teenage girl that weighs about 90lbs hard across the face.  In reality, this would decapitate the girl.  Instead, she just gets knocked down, not even losing consciousness.  Lame.

In another scene near the end of the movie, Ben gets ahold of the keys to an SUV the “final girl” is hiding in.  She locks the doors – Ben uses the fob to unlock the doors.  I guess the filmmakers want us to be impressed by how smart Ben is, being able to use a remote control, but in reality, Ben could easily rip the door completely off of the SUV and disembowel Lucy in one, fluid motion, and Lucy has a good disemboweling coming for the entire movie.

Which is the film’s real sin, if we’re being honest: it wants credit for being clever while refusing to commit to the one honest premise it has, namely that a chimpanzee is not a man in a rubber mask but a compact, tendon-laced meat-grinder with the bite force of a crocodile’s impatient cousin and the social temperament of a drunk uncle who just lost his pension.  The script keeps pulling its punches, or rather pulling Ben’s punches, because the producers apparently decided that an hour and twenty minutes of insipid teenagers getting turned into wet confetti would be “too mean.”¹  Too mean for whom, exactly?  The audience that bought tickets to watch a movie called “Primate”?  Shee-it.

There is, however, one sequence – mid-film, right after the inevitable poolside ketamine-and-White Claw montage – where the movie briefly remembers what it is.  Ben, still damp from chewing through the vet’s mandible in the cold open, slips into the house through the floor-to-ceiling glass that some architect with a death wish installed six inches from the infinity pool.  The kids are doing what kids in these things always do: they are filming each other, they are narrating their own lives in the third person, they are mistaking volume for charisma.  Ben does not monologue.  He does not stalk.  He locomotes, which is polite way of saying he moves like a cannonball made of muscle and bad intentions.  He grabs the golden retriever-looking boyfriend (his name is either Chase or Bryce; the distinction is purely ornamental), lifts him by the throat with one hand, and uses the other to peel the kid’s jaw sideways off his skull like it’s the lid on a can of tennis balls.  The sound design here – credit where it’s due – is fantastic: a wet, fibrous rip that lands somewhere between celery and a phonebook.  For thirty seconds “Primate” is exactly the movie it should have been: mean, fast, uninterested in your feelings about it.

Then it apologizes.²

It apologizes by giving Lucy – the designated Final Girl, who wears her trauma like a tasteful necklace and keeps repeating “we have to stay together” in the tone of someone who has read exactly one article about group survival – the aforementioned SUV to hide in, and by letting her wind a shoving match with Ben over the center console.  She kicks him.  He recoils.  She screams.  He looks confused.  Confused!  A rabid chimpanzee, an animal whose entire evolutionary resume is “rip, tear, dominate,” is written as if he’s just been told his favorite band broke up.  The camera lingers on his eyes, big and wet, while sad piano dribbles in, and for a moment you can feel the film begging you to consider Ben’s interiority.  Fuck that.  If you wanted interiority you should have case human.  You cast a chimp (sure, a human named Miguel Torres Umba in a chimp suit) so you could watch him turn a poolside cabana into a Jackson Pollock made of viscera.  Own it.

The teens, as a unit, are assembled from the same factory that produces reality-TV contestants and vape-shop employees: symmetrical faces, asymmetrical morals, zero impulse control.  They speak in a patois that is 60% acronym, 30% upspeak, 10% genuine confusion about what year it is.  Their dialogue is the kind of recursive self-reference that makes you want to diagram the sentence on a whiteboard just to prove it doesn’t mean anything: “Like, literally, I can’t even, like, literally can’t.”  Ben, to his credit, doesn’t give a shit.  He kills two of them by accident while trying to get to a bag of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos that someone left on the counter.  Okay…he doesn’t…he would have if I had written this ridiculousness, which would have been the only honest product placement to happen all year.

By the time the third act rolls around – sunset, cliff, infinity pool turning pink with blood and hibiscus petals – “Primate” has settled into the rhythm of every other slasher: false scares, a monologue (in sign language) from the adult authority figure who arrives late and should have died faster, and a final confrontation that is supposed to feel cathartic and instead feels like a negotiated settlement.  Lucy, bloodied but still camera-ready, chucks been off a deck.  One of the table’s thick, jagged legs punch through his chest and abdomen like a dull spears.  He hangs there for a beat, impaled, eyes wide, hands twitching at the wood as if he could negotiate with it.  Lucy just stares, breathing through her mouth, while Ben makes a noise that is not a roar and not a whimper but something in between, a wet exhale that sounds like air leaving a punctured tire.  He dies.  Blah blah blah.

So do I recommend it?  Sure, in the same way I recommend watching those selfie clips: not because it’s good, but because there’s a particular, feral pleasure in watching entitlement meet consequence and lose.  Just don’t expect “Primate” to have the courage of its own premise.  It wants to be nasty, but it keeps flinching.  It wants to be a parable, but it can’t decide whether the moral is “don’t build houses on cliffs” or “don’t underestimate primates.”  In the end it’s a middling slasher with an inspired casting choice, a few glorious seconds of honest carnage, and a whole lot of nervous hedging.  Watch it with the sound up, the lights down, and a drink you can afford to snort through your nose when Ben finally – briefly – gets to be the animal he is.

¹ Which is rich, coming from a studio whose last three releases were all subtitled variations on “People Get Murdered In A House.”

² The apology is structural: the film cuts away from the aftermath of the jaw-peel to a slow-motion flashback of Ben as a baby, bottle-fed by the vet whose face he will later remove. It’s supposed to humanize. It humanizes the way a taxidermist humanizes a deer.

N.P.: “Guns/Steel” – Metal Scar Radio, Hybrid