It’s Planet Of The Apes meets Cujo, and it sure isn’t pretty. Part of me actually loves this kind of thing, but it has more to do with when the film is than how good or bad the film happens to be. For a lot of critics, we have just spent the better part of our holiday season being inundated by awards bait in one form or another. Everyone wants your attention right now. I have to vote in two guilds, and honestly by the time it’s over and I’ve managed to cram 60-70 films or more into my Holiday activities, I’m honestly more than a little burned out. So after that little break as January begins, I always welcome that first film that asks nothing more of me than to sit there and soak it in. There aren’t going to be any Best Picture nominations here. No one is going to be buzzing about Primate when we start talking Best Actors and Cinematography. Johannes Roberts isn’t expecting me to remember a dang thing about his work when next year’s Best Director choices come up. The screenplay is (thank God) completely forgettable, and all I will remember, if I remember anything at all about Primate when the 2026 awards season rolls around, is that it was mindless and that’s exactly what I needed in that first week of press screenings in January. I hope you guys had a blast making the film, because you gave me exactly what I was looking for … absolutely nothing. And you got me in and out in UNDER 90 minutes. I love you guys, but I’ll forget I said that in a few months. Is that OK? This is going to be a really short love affair. It’s the perfect one-night stand of movies. But that doesn’t mean that I really didn’t love you guys for 89 minutes. Thus ends the sermon. Can I get an Amen?
Hears what I remember from a memory already getting a little fuzzy. Fuzzy? Oh, right. There’s a chimpanzee named Ben. Perfect name. When I was a kid there was this rat named Ben, and I think he hung out with a young Michael Jackson. That was likely the beginning of the whole Neverland thing. So Ben is the pet chimp of the film’s title. Give the folks some credit here. They used a little bit of puppetry and CGI mixed in with some practical makeup f/x, and Ben actually looks pretty lifelike. But the film is always rather dark. Now that could have been a lens issue at our screening. That has been known to happen, or it might have been Roberts using the shadows to get away with more than he might have in the cold light of day. But for the most part, I’ll say that watching this chimp go through a rabies infection was more interesting than watching a dog in Cujo. A chimp was actually a pretty brave choice here and added a few points to the film’s interest and entertainment value here.
Make no mistake. Ben is a character in the film. Of course, he’s a vicious, shredding maniac after a time, but he is an essential character. He’s been part of an experimentation that has made him rather smart. He knows sign language and uses a computerized child’s toy to communicate. It’s always so cute until someone loses the flesh on their face, and then it’s not so cute anymore. Ben has some quirks.
He’s the pet of Adam (Kotsur), who has written some cute books and has taught through his books and through Ben how to communicate better with the deaf. This is a good thing, because Adam is himself deaf. Books have been very good to Adam. He’s made lots of money and owns a mansion on what is kind of his own Hawaiian Island. Dude’s rich, and when family and friends come to spend some vacation time with Adam and Ben, it looks like a pretty sweet deal. Daughters Lucy (Sequoyah) and Erin (Hunter) bring some friends home, and that pretty much provides the fodder when Ben goes off his banana. That means the new college coeds are going to be taking off more than their bikinis. A little flesh here … a body part there … and when it looks like their might be too few items on Ben’s menu, some more folks drop by to play Ben’s gruesome game.
We get lectured a bit on how bad rabies is with a little history lesson on our earliest encounters with the disease originally known as hydrophobia because rabies sufferers get afraid of water. Did I mention there’s a pool on the premises, and it’s not just for giving our coeds a nice place to cool off. It’s their only protection from Ben. I remember an old Bill Cosby joke. This was before he started to experiment in a new brand of mixed drinks for the ladies. “How long can you tread water?” That’s a good question for the coeds and the people making this film. The answer is not as long as 89 minutes. This one is going nowhere, and man did I need that.
“Let me shake your hand.”
