There’s something you don’t know about me…
For almost as long as I’ve been writing at Daily Grindhouse, I have been working on something very special.
It’s not entirely unique, but it is as comprehensive an accounting on a subject as I’ve personally ever seen anyone do in this space.
There are plenty of terrific writers about film, and plenty of experts on all kinds of subgenres, and there are even, I’m ready to admit, plenty of people who are more knowledgeable than I am on this subject. But there aren’t many who have gone as deep or reached as far.
I don’t even know exactly why I’ve been doing this, and I’m hardly sure that it will ever see the light of day. But I do a little more work on it every few weeks. I chip away at it, like a lonely sculptor carving a sad masterpiece out of a great mountain.
It may not be finished in my lifetime, and it will then fall to my kin to complete this undertaking. What, at long last, is this epic proposition?
I have been cataloguing films where apes and monkeys of all sizes have attacked human beings.
You would think somebody had done this already, and you’d be right, but only partially. Sure, IMDb and Wikipedia have lists. They have great lists! But those lists are inevitably incomplete. Nobody has come close to capturing the true scope of the matter. I don’t know if anybody can. I’m not arrogant enough to assume that I can get it done in this lifetime.
This issue is so much bigger than you can possibly imagine.
Where would you start? KING KONG? Sure, right on. It’s the ultimate ape-attack film. Some might argue it’s got a claim to being the Great American Film. (Strange people.) And it was released in 1933, right? Golly, that was a long time ago. It’s got to be the first time an ape ever attacked a person in a feature film, right?
Wrong. Dead wrong.
For one thing, starting with KING KONG would be discounting the entire silent era and almost all of pre-Code Hollywood. It would also discount foreign films, which would be a huge oversight. Asian and European filmmakers in particular love these scenes almost as much as we Americans do.
So where do we start?
Motion pictures began being screened publicly in 1895. This is how far back we are going to have to go, my friends. I’m not kidding. This is how long this has been going on. As long as there have been movies themselves, there have been apes and monkeys attacking people in them.
My project takes into account the various forms that apes take on film: Was it a person wearing an ape costume, as in PLANET OF THE APES (1968) and its original run of sequels? Was it a motion-capped actor, like in the more recent round of PLANET OF THE APES movies? Was it stop-motion, like in 1933’s KING KONG? Was it one ape standing in for another, such as in 1986’s LINK, where an orangutan portrays a chimpanzee? (This kind of thing happens more often than you’d ever think to imagine.)
I’m not saying I’m the expert on the subject. But I’m becoming an expert. One of the experts. It hasn’t made me rich. It hasn’t made me popular. It sure as hell hasn’t gotten me laid. But it does give me the confidence to speak with a measure of authority when I say (finally!) that PRIMATE is near the top of the crop when it comes to the highly-specific subgenre of ape-attack horror in feature films.
PRIMATE was dumped into theaters within the first two weeks of the year, usually a post-awards-season graveyard for forgotten films of the future. I was there opening weekend, as I’m sure is apparent by now. What a neat surprise: It is not only one of the stronger horror films so far this year, but it’s an immediately essential film in the ape-attack subgenre of horror and science-fiction films.
One thing ape attacks can’t claim to feature with any kind of regularity is verisimilitude. There is a lot of swatting in these pictures. You will see apes slap at people, and people falling down. These are generally bloodless affairs. This is a function of rating. A great majority of ape-attack films were made before the 1960s. The MPAA was established in 1968. Even then, most of these movies were simplistic in terms of violence. Monkey swings paw, person falls down.
PRIMATE is a rarity: An R-rated ape-attack film. LINK was rated R, but mainly because Elisabeth Shue’s rear end is briefly visible. I can promise you with absolute authority that Elisabeth Shue’s rear end is far more agreeable to look at than the effects of a chimpanzee attack, which is what PRIMATE has on offer. I was immediately curious about PRIMATE when I learned that it was going to be rated R. I’m no gorehound, but with almost scientific interest, I wanted to know what kind of accuracy PRIMATE would be going for.
A man’s face is separated from his skull within the first five minutes of PRIMATE.
Call this a fair warning, not a spoiler. This movie isn’t messing around.
Now: I love and admire monkeys and apes. Second only to dogs, I don’t think there are any animals that exist that I have revered more throughout my life. But just as the case with dogs, my infinite love and reverence comes with the awareness, however distant, that there is always a potential for violence. And why should that be a surprise? Apes are the closest earthly kin to mankind, and human beings, however wonderful they can sometimes be, can also be vicious and cruel.
PRIMATE is a film that takes that into account, to the point that, like JAWS with sharks, I’m not even sure that it’s good for chimpanzees. Remember that Spielberg carries guilt to this day for doing that PR hit on great whites. Will Johannes Roberts come to feel the same way about PRIMATE? It’s a brutally effective film on pure horror-movie terms. And if you, unlike myself, are a gorehound, you will find this film to be a feast of hideous delights. What sort of damage could a chimp do to a human head if it were so inclined? By the end of this film, you will find out.
PRIMATE was directed by the aforementioned Johannes Roberts, who wrote it with Ernest Riera. Roberts is a talented craftsman of thrillers and horror pictures who is surprisingly prolific: He has almost put out a movie a year for the past ten years. He’s probably best known for 48 METERS DOWN and its sequel, so again, maybe he can talk to Steven Spielberg about great whites and regret, but he doesn’t need to regret his job on the filmmaking end: Those are solid and suspenseful movies, and I found PRIMATE to be equally well-crafted.
It’s a simple story, told in under ninety minutes: Ben is a chimpanzee who lives with a family in Hawaii. The woman who adopted him is dead long before the film begins. She’s the one who taught Ben to communicate, using a tablet. As the film begins, Ben’s adoptive sister Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) is returning home from college to watch over her younger sister Erin (Gia Hunter) while their father Adam (Troy Kotsur from CODA) is away for a book signing. When Ben is bitten by a rabid mongoose, he becomes deranged and goes on a killing spree, terrorizing Lucy and Erin and murdering anyone unlucky enough to get in between them.
The film is admirable in its efficiency. Roberts is methodical but quick in the way he and cinematographer Stephen Murphy provide a lay of the land. The geography of the property where Ben is soon to roam is shown clearly so that there’s never any doubt where we are (even if the characters are often unsure of Ben’s location). Far too many horror films fail short in this area. It adds to the suspense if you know how many floors are in a house, and so on, so it’s clear where people are trying to escape to.
As much as I’m praising the short running time and the directness of the story, I also wonder if the film could have benefited from just a little more table-setting. We (the audience) barely get to know Ben before he becomes infected and turns absolutely evil. It’s an interesting and unique angle that these two girls grew up with a chimp, almost like a brother, but we don’t get enough of a sense of the “brother” side before his heel turn. But again, the fact that I am debating the character development of an evil chimpanzee at all is an obvious and massive credit to the film.
It’s also an intriguing choice to have Troy Kotsur in the film. The actor, like his character, is deaf, which only matters in the film as far as moments where the absence of the sense of hearing puts him in a precarious position when he is dealing with an enemy who has the advantage of stealth. I think probably there is something to the theme of communication, since Ben has his tablet, the teen girls are obviously connected to their phones, and Adam uses sign language. It’s not necessarily all that deep, but it’s a layer that most horror movies don’t bother to have.
Primate
One thing I liked a lot about PRIMATE is that I liked the kids. Conventional slashers (and this is ultimately a slasher film) have teen characters that are just there to be killed. I liked these kids and I wanted them all to live. Johnny Sequoyah is the standout as the steely and resourceful Lucy, but Victoria Wyant was very sweet as Lucy’s BFF Kate, and Jessica Alexander provides the perfect level of tension as Kate’s friend who isn’t much of a fan of Lucy and vice versa, only to be united with her against a common enemy.
But arguably the film’s central performance is Miguel Torres Umba as Ben. I can’t stress how important it is that Ben is played by an actor dressed like a chimp, and that it works. I went into PRIMATE assuming this would be mo-cap and maybe in some scenes it was (I will have to watch the movie again), but it was a true joy to suddenly realize “There’s somebody in there!” As much as I didn’t want to spoil that here, I think it’s worth noting since I started out talking about the lineage of portrayal modes in ape-attack films. Plus, anyone who reads this far has probably already seen the movie and is just as obsessed with it as I am. The effect of seeing eyes move, living eyes, mischievously sinister-looking eyes, not animated eyes, just adds to the unease of the events unfolding. This really was a nasty treat of a villain performance.
PRIMATE may not be a perfect film (what is?), but it’s one of the strongest horror films so far this year, and it has achieved a unique position in the vast and unusual subgenre of ape-attack films. And it feels like half of my critiques could be easily solved with a sequel, which really just feels like a compliment in disguise. It did well enough in theaters, but here’s hoping it does even better on streaming so a sequel becomes more likely. There is something zeitgeist-y about PRIMATE too, noting how there is a movie in theaters right now about a guy who famously owned a chimp and sang about an animal friend named “Ben,” although, maybe ironically, that Ben wasn’t a chimp. Clearly one of these films is the movie for our American moment, but it may or may not be the one that has my vote.
– JON ABRAMS.
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Tags: Apes, Chimpanzees, Hawaii, Horror, January, Jon Abrams
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