It’s the kind of premise that could easily be made into D-grade shlock: a pet chimp at a remote home in Hawaii gets rabies and starts ripping humans apart. But Primate, which is streaming now on Paramount Plus following its theatrical run in January, deserves at least a “B” on the shlock-grading scale. It is very much about a rabid pet chimp absolutely destroying many poor victims unlucky enough to stumble across its path. But in the hands of director Johannes Roberts, it’s an unusually tense and satisfying creature feature — one that confirms the filmmaker’s status as one of the best B-picture directors currently working.
Roberts, an Englishman, cut his teeth on low-budget horror movies throughout the early 2000s. He wrote and directed eight U.K. releases that didn’t always make it across the pond, and weren’t widely seen if they did. Storage 24, for example, apparently grossed a whopping $72 in its single-day U.S. theatrical release. But eventually he made the surprise hit 47 Meters Down, armed with a hooky subject (sharks!) and premise (two sisters are trapped when their shark-diving cage falls to the ocean floor), plus a recognizable star (Mandy Moore) and a twist ending.
Most of what Roberts has made since then has been sequels and reboots: 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, plus The Strangers: Prey at Night and Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City. On paper, it’s a remarkably unpromising run of brand names with subtitles — all of which wind up working much better than anyone should have expected.
The Strangers: Prey at Night, for example, doesn’t fully recapture the hushed doominess that envelopes the original film, but it’s a fun throwback slasher, likely to stand as plenty of horror fans’ favorite of the unexpected series. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City probably won’t be so lucky. It’s destined to be overshadowed by Paul W.S. Anderson’s long-running film series on one side and Zach Cregger’s hotly anticipated reboot on the other. But like Prey at Night, Raccoon City throws back to movies its predecessors don’t much resemble, in this case early John Carpenter. Roberts cited the siege thriller Assault on Precinct 13 as a model for the film’s tightly contained spaces. There’s also a bit of The Fog in the movie’s eerie evocation of a ghost-town-like city that’s about to be abandoned for good.
Watching Roberts’ work, his aesthetic sensibilities become increasingly clear. He’s fond of imagery tinted to an impossible monochrome, like the red lighting that makes a simple downpour look like a rain of blood early in Welcome to Raccoon City. For that matter, he seems to like the eerie, shimmery qualities of water in general, figuring as it does in the 47 Meters Down movies as well as a standout scene from Prey at Night where slasher and victim face off in a neon-lit pool. That scene is mischievously accompanied by Bonnie Tyler’s “Total Eclipse of the Heart,” while Welcome to Raccoon City briefly blasts Jennifer Paige’s pop hit “Crush” over a man engulfed in flames, and scores a single-take scene of mayhem to Journey’s “Any Way You Want It.”
Most of those stylistic touches are present and accounted for in Primate, though it lacks a memorable needle-drop moment. (Someone get Roberts some new records!) When the rabid chimp called Ben terrorizes his former adopted family Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), her sister Erin (Gia Hunter), and their friends, the victims spend a substantial chunk of the movie in a cliffside pool, with Ben guarding the obvious exit. Despite the movie taking place in a well-lit house on the ocean in scenic Hawaii, Roberts gives the overnight scenes a variety of menacing nocturnal glows. Primate also might be his goriest film, with some truly inventive, sometimes shocking makeup effects showing the full extent of Ben’s terrifying strength and animal instincts. All together, it’s a surprisingly sleek film, built out from an overfamiliar premise and thinly developed characters.
The art of developing compelling and fully dimensional characters has, as yet, eluded Roberts. But with Primate, he confirms that he belongs alongside thriller craftsmen like Jaume Collet-Serra and Alexandre Aja (who executive-produced 47 Meters Down) — the contemporary equivalent of the inventive directors who used to cut their teeth on Nightmare on Elm Street sequels. They’ve all developed specialty areas: Collet-Serra excels at neo-Hitchcock, while Aja does well with tight spaces. Roberts has become the retro-horror guy of the moment, going back to basics even when making sequels to other people’s movies. Primate may be his most evolved work yet.
Primate is streaming on Paramount Plus. Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City is streaming on Disney Plus. Both 47 Meters Down movies are streaming on Prime Video.
