'Primates' review: the monkey sees, the monkey kills

A chimpanzee with a typewriter could write the script for “Primate” in an hour. Some pretty young women throw a pool party at a house on Oahu and… ouch! — the family's rabid pet chimpanzee bashes their skulls. That's it, that's the plot. Any hint that the movie might be about something else: a love triangle, a recently deceased mother, a veterinarian's bewilderment that Hawaii isn't even have rage – it's nothing more than a banana peel that makes the audience expect a narrative.

I'm not foaming at the mouth about the death of cinema or whatever. Honestly, the deaths in “Primate” are great. The problem is the dead space between them when we realize that we are very bored.

The setup is this: Our heroine, Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), who's off to school somewhere to study something, has flown home for an indefinite period of time with her best friend, Kate (Victoria Wyant), and a classmate she loathes, the vivacious sexpot Hannah (Jess Alexander), who doesn't inform her host that she'll be accompanying them until they're on the plane. You're already wondering if this is a monkey's take on mammal behavior, but it's only the actual screenwriters, Johannes Roberts and Ernest Riera (the former of whom also directs), who clue us in that bringing a brain into this wet adventure is as useless as packing a snowsuit. (They previously teamed up for Mandy Moore's 2017 shark movie, “47 Meters Down.”)

Lucy's father, Adam (Troy Kotsur of “CODA”), and her younger sister, Erin (Gia Hunter), have been hanging around their cliffside estate mourning the death of their mother, a primatologist who died of cancer the previous year. They're both lonely, but at least Mom left behind her research chimpanzee, Ben (played by Miguel Torres Umba), who uses a talking touchpad to communicate.

“Lucy is back, Miss Ben,” the chimpanzee says, pressing a few keys. That's pretty much how the entire dialogue goes even when the humans are talking, which, when it's a couple of frat boys the girls picked up on the plane, is part of the joke. Brad and Drew (Charlie Mann and Tienne Simon) enter the house like two gorillas, burping and high-fiving, hoping to seduce girls with verbal skills that ended up in preschool. “It doesn't hurt, okay?” Mann's hilarious Brad tells Ben, smiling nervously and clapping his hands in an attempt to make friends. For a tender moment, you think these apes might be soulmates.

“Primate” has not evolved happily. The kills are gruesomely entertaining, the opening murder splashing the audience with such brutality that my theater howled with joy. In just two minutes, the movie had delivered on everything it promised: a snorting monkey, a fool in a floral shirt, a shot of a sinister tire swing, and a close-up of a bald cheekbone.

If the pace had stayed this breakneck, my fellow schlock lovers and I would have been happily beating our chests. But at less than an hour and a half, “Primate” is mostly dragged scenes of victims hiding in closets and trying not to scream while Ben wanders around the property acting like a hungover kid on steroids. Anything squeaky causes him to have a violent attack.

Umba, the motion specialist behind the simian special effects, convinces. But the film treats his character like a generic bad guy slasher that ticks off the standard tropes: the scary surprise, the out-of-focus loom, the pacing when the villain seems outmatched but somehow staggers on his prehensile feet. Roberts doesn't offer much empathy for the poor, sick critter other than a pause as Ben momentarily reflects on his reflection in a pool while Adrian Johnston's eerie synth piano score tinkles.

Let me give the movie some credit: the performances are pretty good. Recent Oscar winner Kotsur has a casual indifference that makes you believe in his character until the moment he starts punching a monkey in the face. While Mann's damned moron is only in the movie to add to the body count, the young actor brings a kinetic, goofy charisma to his very few scenes, and as a reward, Roberts grants him the best, longest death. Set in a romantic bedroom, it seems like a morbid joke about consent. (Presumably, at some point in this horny jock's past, he did something to deserve it.)

Likewise, Alexander's Hannah is the naughty girl who deserves to be punished for rudely approaching Lucy's crush, Nick (Benjamin Cheng). But she's so magnetic that we root for her survival anyway. Just as Renée Zellweger and Matthew McConaughey somehow managed to have careers after starring in the fourth “Texas Chainsaw Massacre,” Alexander is an up-and-coming performer: a screen presence with that extra sparkle.

The script tells the curiosity of an anthropologist about the mating habits of Collegiate Homo sapiens. Unfortunately, humanity seems to be a species in decline. Faced with an angry monkey, these kids can't think of much else to do other than run around looking for their smartphones. An overreliance on tools weakens our civilization (and undermines the dramatic emotion of the film). When Ben breaks a television, perhaps Roberts is even making some sort of social argument.

Chimpanzees and humans share 98.4% of the same DNA and if you want to check that statistic, there is so much blood smeared around this house that you can easily test a sample. Presumably, Lucy's character was named as a nod to our first known ancestor, a 3.2-million-year-old Australopithecus afarensis that was about the same height as Ben. Our closest relative, the bonobo, shares 98.7% of our genes and has been known to kill each other by bursting a male's testicles, a fact of nature that Roberts must save for the sequel.

Puzzlingly, “Primate” blames Ben's terrible temperament on rage, not the more interesting causes of chimpanzee aggression such as depression, psychological confusion and overmedication. It also doesn't delve into the emotional horror of a homeowner realizing his best friend is capable of ripping off a human face, much less the guilt and agony of being unable to stop an attack. When a Connecticut woman was forced to stab her beloved pet after it mauled a friend, she lamented that stabbing him “was like stabbing myself.” (He later adopted a replacement chimpanzee.)

But it's foolish to expect real social science from a movie that expands the old name for rabies (hydrophobia, or fear of water) to the absurd idea that Ben's only safe hiding place is the pool. That being said, in case anyone from the Department of Health and Human Services sees “Primate” on a plane, I feel obligated to mention that the rabies vaccine is 100% effective. The last thing we need is a government decree forcing every American to surround their home with a moat.