There's a line between narrative efficiency and narrative indifference that
Primate sadly crosses in the wrong direction -- I guess I'm supposed to be happy that this movie trims off all the fat of "character" and "story" and just gets down to its nasty business of a chimpanzee tearing people's faces off as quickly as possible? Maybe I just wasn't in the right mood. (Perhaps we can blame the two assholes sitting next to me playing on their phones the entire time for cutting down on my ability to have fun.) (Assholes.)
Anyway I admit I'm a hypocrite here on some level because that's all I want from a franchise like the Final Destination movies, for example -- I'm no snob when it comes to the simple pleasures of some cinematic death spectacle. I think what differentiates Primate from the Final Destination movies is Final Destination movies are at their best just Looney Tunes with exploding melon heads -- when they get too meanspirited like the 4th film in the franchise it becomes everybody's least favorite one.
And Primate is a mean movie. Viciously cruel. And so its wildly over-the-top violence (there's a scene with a jawbone... well I won't ruin it but my god) being inflicted onto characters that are paper-thin ciphers... it just becomes wholly unpleasant to watch. I didn't have fun with the rampaging chimp movie! It just made me feel sick.
I suppose there's another aspect to my queasiness I should admit to -- realistic Animal Attack movies have always, for my entire life, been the subgenre of horror movie that've bothered me the most. ("Realistic" being the key word -- something like Food of the Gods with giant chickens is just goofy good fun for the whole family.) But there's precedent, and maybe I should've expected this reaction. Primate, about a chimp who catches rabies, is basically just the opening scene of Nope mixed with Cujo, and Cujo was the first movie I had to exit as a kid because it freaked me out too much. Same goes for the 2014 bear attack movie Backcountry (which I've spoken about here on the site before), a movie that upset me profoundly -- I still shudder at the memory of it. So it would seem that I can take all kinds of human-on-human violence but there's something primal I can't stomach when it's animals doing the gnawing.
Not to turn this into a therapy session -- haha too late! This entire "review" has been little more than that. But I was bitten in the face by my grandfather's doberman as a little kid. Maybe this all stems from that. Hey whaddya know -- I have finally, all these many decades into living, uncovered my trigger! I been triggered y'all!
Anyway, Primate. I didn't enjoy it. But I don't think it deserves credit for being so exxxtreme that it triggered me either -- I've recommend Backcountry to a million people because it manages to capture an experience that feels sickeningly real. Same for Cujo, which turns into a truly sick-making spectacle of claustrophobia. Primate, for all its gnarly gore, never achieves a sense of reality or admirable verisimilitude. The deep silliness of its "infinity pool next to a cliff" setting; the fact that I couldn't tell you who any of these characters are supposed to be besides fodder for the monkey's jaws. Every character behaves astoundingly stupid at every moment. This movie is just unpleasant and dumb. Two opposable thumbs down!
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