Starring Johnny Sequoyah, Jessica Alexander, Troy Kotsur

Directed by Johannes Roberts

Paramount / 18 Hz – in cinemas now

When Ben, the cute family chimp, gets rabies, the weekend turns into a face-off (in more ways than one) between the beast and its hapless twentysomething housemates.

‘Lawks-a mercy!’ as they were wont to say in the olden days. As the lights went up in the cinema I was in need of a stiff drink. Standing at the cinema’s urinal, the chap next to me said: ‘Were you just watching that mentalistic chimp film?’ his eyes wide, looking a little shell-shocked. I guess I must have looked shell-shocked too.

I could just leave it there, as that sums up the experience of watching Johannes Roberts’ Cujo style chimp horror nicely; however I suppose I ought to expand a little. There’s no denying that Primate delivers on its 18 certificate warning that it contains ‘strong bloody violence and injury detail’. I have a pretty robust stomach when it comes to screen gore but this had me not just hiding behind my fingers, but curling into a foetal ball waggling my legs like a beached woodlouse, and wailing ‘No neeeeeed!’ at the screen in my best nasal Mancunian. Director Roberts is unfamiliar with the notion of ‘cutting away’.

I was also laughing my beached woodlouse socks off.

Primate, while undoubtedly effective in eliciting gleeful yelps of disgust from the audience, is daft as a brush. Its central human characters are so collectively stupid I was rooting for the chimp all the way. They’re so daft at points, they make going down to the basement in your standard cabin-in-the-woods slasher look downright sensible. Whether this is deliberate or not is hard to tell.

I sensed that Roberts and his writing partner Ernest Riera had explored and abandoned a few narrative complications along the way – a dead scientist mother, the fact that there is no rabies on Hawaii where the movie is set, plus a whole raft of relationship dynamics that go absolutely nowhere – and abandoned them in favour of a wham-bam-thank-you-mam 89 minutes of rabid, drooling, popcorn-spilling horror fun.

It’s good to see deaf actor and campaigner Troy Kotsur (Oscar nominated for CODA) in a mainstream role, and the movie has a go at inverting a few other stereotypes with varying degrees of success. And for fans of TV comedy drama Catastrophe comedian Rob Delaney gets a fun, if ill-fated cameo.

Verdict: Primate might be too much for some people, but if gratuitous chimp ultra-violence takes you to your happy place, then this is the movie for you. 6/10

Martin Jameson

www.ninjamarmoset.com