A rabid chimpanzee kills people. Yep, that’s the plot. The content issues are equally predictable: blood, gore, language and bikinis. If you’re really a parent reading this summary, looking to see if your 10-year-old child should watch Primate, it’s possible that Plugged In is not an ideal movie review outlet for you.
Let’s just spoil the movie’s message right here: Don’t adopt chimpanzees. Just … don’t.
Ben was a chimpanzee celebrity—a prime-time primate, if you will. Rescued as a baby by a prominent linguist, Ben learned how to communicate with his keeper. In fact, he eventually learned more than 300 words, far outdistancing the vocabulary needs of most chimpanzees and potentially qualifying Ben for political office.
And not only was Ben smart, he was adorable. No wonder so many journalists flocked to the linguist’s Hawaiian compound to interview the chimp. And even if the conversations were a little stilted—Ben needed to talk through sign language or, later on, through a specially-made communication tablet—he still had more to say than many celebrity interviewees.
Alas, the linguist died of cancer; Ben grew less adorable and interest in the chimp quickly faded. But Ben still lived a pretty comfortable life. Unlike his wild primate pals, Ben never had to worry about a lack of food or shelter or plush toys to play with. The linguist’s family—husband, Adam, and their two daughters, Lucy and Erin—loved Ben. Indeed, they considered him part of the family.
That said, you don’t typically lock your baby brother in an outdoor pen. Why not? Well, for one thing, you’d want to keep him safe from rabid mongooses.
Of course, Ben—family member or no—was locked in an outdoor pen, and wouldn’t you know it? A mongoose wandered in and bit the chimp. And while that bite was literally the last thing the mongoose ever did (unless you count the bleeding and dying bit), the damage was done. Ben, once the subject of rabid press attention, was now just plain rabid.
It’d be a shame if college-aged Lucy came home for a visit with a few friends right about now, wouldn’t it? And it’d be too bad if her dad left home for a few days, leaving said friends unsupervised and unprotected. And it’d be especially tragic if, y’know, Ben found his way out of his pen.
If all those things happened concurrently, it would remind us all why you shouldn’t adopt chimpanzees—even chimpanzees that know 300 words.
It takes some guts to deal with a rabid chimpanzee. And while we see plenty of actual guts during the course of this movie (more on them later), those metaphorical guts are on display, too. Lucy shows especial bravery in dealing with this simian nemesis. Lucy’s best friend, Kate, offers a surprising level of gumption, too, risking her life repeatedly to protect Lucy.
None.
Lucy and her friends (two female, one male) swim in the family pool, where they frolic in bikinis and swim trunks. Female characters wear other outfits that bear both cleavage and midriffs. Lucy and her chum, Hannah, seem to have designs on Nick, a longtime platonic pal of Lucy’s. When Lucy’s father learns that Nick just broke up with his girlfriend, Adam prods Lucy to make a move on the guy. But Hannah’s the more forward of the two, and she and Nick wind up kissing.
Lucy, Hannah and Kate also meet a couple of guys on the plane to Hawaii: The women ogle shirtless pictures of one of them that he posted online, and Lucy leaves a voice message for them, jokingly inviting them to come over and have sex with her and her friends.
Kate and Lucy wear necklaces with broken-heart charms attached—each woman carrying around one half of the heart. But those charms appear to be symbols of the girls’ friendship and nothing more.
When a guy gets pinned to a bed by Ben, he jokes that Ben should have bought him dinner first.
“Ben would never hurt anyone,” someone says in Primate. That someone turns out to be very, very wrong.
A man’s face is partially torn off. Someone else’s lower jaw is ripped away. (The still-living victim’s tongue flaps about, as if trying to say something.) Seemingly a chunk of scalp is torn off of one woman, though she lives long enough to suffer a different demise. Characters are beaten to death and thrown off cliff faces. (We watch a falling victim’s head crunch on the rocks below.) Some characters have their heads smashed in with rocks.
A character is stabbed in the chest with a broken bottle, causing a ton of blood to spill. Another scene shows a character falling on a jagged piece of wood, leading to bloody impalement. Limbs are snapped (though sometimes with no apparent ill effects), claws gouge bloody canyons on skin, and people are very badly bitten. (One bite, which sends copious amounts of blood flooding into a swimming pool, requires a tourniquet.)
We see people fight Ben—with both parties punching and kicking. Bottles are smashed. Someone attacks Ben with a shovel.
We see the bloody bite mark that Ben suffered from the rabid mongoose—along with the mongoose’s torn, bloodied carcass. Glass doors, closets, televisions and other inanimate objects are destroyed.
About 16 f-words and at least four s-words. We also hear “b–ch,” “d–n,” and “p-ssed.” God’s name is misused four times, three of those paired with the word “d–n.”
Nick smokes what appears to be a couple of marijuana blunts, occasionally sharing with others. (He offers it to one woman, suggesting that it’s a great way to deal with their long flight’s jet lag.)
Lucy and her friends drink—and get drunk off—beer. (Empty beer bottles and cans are found throughout the home.) A couple of guys brag about how “lit” they are. Their vehicle contains a great many empty beer cans and bottles. And when they walk into a strange house, one—still holding a beer in his hand—asks his pal to get him another.
A character vomits, albeit barely off-screen.
There are people who enjoy seeing chimpanzees rip the jaws off people.
I know this because I was in a theater full of them. One person enjoyed the carnage so much that he laughed almost the entire time.
I walked away feeling puzzled by that sense of enjoyment—and a little left out.
Primate is a well-constructed bit of horror tripe, filled with jump scares and gore aplenty. Genre aficionados may appreciate the film’s ridiculously bloody, lowbrow qualities. But for me, gore does not lead to either scares or snickers. And the fact that the movie’s main emotional pull was toward Ben—an admittedly terrifying chimp who never asked for any of this to happen to him—speaks volumes to the lack of development we’re given for the movie’s human characters.
Primate clocks in under a 90-minute runtime. But that feels about 75 minutes longer than this movie deserves. Undergoing a voluntary tax audit or scrubbing your bathroom tiles clean of mildew would be better ways to spend your time.
Paul Asay has been part of the Plugged In staff since 2007, watching and reviewing roughly 15 quintillion movies and television shows. He’s written for a number of other publications, too, including Time, The Washington Post and Christianity Today. The author of several books, Paul loves to find spirituality in unexpected places, including popular entertainment, and he loves all things superhero. His vices include James Bond films, Mountain Dew and terrible B-grade movies. He’s married, has two children and a neurotic dog, runs marathons on occasion and hopes to someday own his own tuxedo. Feel free to follow him on Twitter @AsayPaul.
