Jan 9, 2026 7:18am PT 'Primate' Review: A Pet Chimp Goes Ape in the First Simian-Next-Door Slasher Movie. It Gets Two-and-a-Half Bananas The family chimp turns rabid, but always seems like a real animal, in Johannes Roberts's slickly executed piece of slaughterhouse schlock. By Owen Gleiberman Plus Icon Owen Gleiberman Chief Film Critic @OwenGleiberman Latest 'Greenland: Migration' Review: Gerard Butler Heads Up a 'Greenland' Sequel That's a Dull Dystopian Slog 1 day ago 'I'm Chevy Chase and You're Not' Review: Marina Zenovich's Fascinating Doc Explores How Chevy Chase's Dark Side Was the Flip Side of His Genius 3 days ago The People Who Say Timothée Chalamet's 'Marty Supreme' Character Isn't 'Likable' Sound Like Corrupt Studio Executives 6 days ago See All Gareth Gatrell / PARAMOUNT PICTURES "Primate," which is your basic, everyday chimp-goes-ape slasher movie, opens with a solemn title informing us that the first recorded case of "hydrophobia" ("fear of water") was in 2300 BC. It then drops the bomb that hydrophobia is now referred to as rabies. All very ominous, though this little science lesson is largely piffle, since it comes close to suggesting that rabies is a psychological malady. (Rabies victims do have hydrophobia, but it's not as if that's what rabies is. It's a viral disease.) At this point, you may be poised to giggle, and that's a good place to start as you watch "Primate," since the movie is funny as only a bloody disgusting formulaic-but-halfway-clever slasher film can be. In this case, we're chortling at the sheer damage a chimpanzee that has given in to its inner beast can cause. It's a trash premise, but the film's director, Johannes Roberts ("47 Meters Down"), does something shrewd. He makes the chimp "real" rather than just another over-the-top fantasy-thriller monster. "Primate" is set almost entirely in a palatial cliffside home in Hawaii that's perched at the secluded edge of a woods. Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), who's in college, is the main character (in essence, the final girl), who returns home to visit her teenage sister, Erin (Gia Hunter), and their celebrated crime-fiction author dad, Adam, who is deaf (he's played by Troy Kotsur, the magnetic actor from "Coda"). The girls' mother has recently died of cancer, but it's a mostly warm and happy reunion, the other member of the family being Ben, their pet chimp, who was brought home by mom as part of a linguistics experiment. Popular on Variety For a while, Ben wanders around in a red shirt, clutching a teddy bear, cutely communicating with words he punches into a vocal digital keypad ("Lucy back. Ben missed"). It turns out, though, that he's been bitten by a mongoose with the rabies virus, and it doesn't take long for him to devolve into a murderous simian. (The movie should have taken a bit more time with it, actually.) He traps Lucy and Erin and two friends in the swimming pool at the bottom of the house. They're safe in the water, but they can't get out. Ben moves too fast, and as soon as he takes a major chomp out of Erin's leg, the movie is off and running. Is "Primate" a slickly executed piece of slaughterhouse shlock? Very much so. Yet Ben, as a slasher, represents a minor triumph of practical effects (he's played by Miguel Torres Umba in an ape suit). His chimp grin that turns into a gnashing leer makes him as effective a figure of fear as most masked killers. And part of the grisly semi-comedy of it all is that he's not evil, no more so than the shark in "Jaws" or the rabid St. Bernard in "Cujo" (which Roberts has cited as his key inspiration). What we want from this movie, and what "Primate" delivers, is mayhem staged with a creative appreciation for what a chimp who's been stripped down to his id can do. The entire movie might be a riff on the TV-chimp-goes-wild chapter of Jordan Peele's "Nope," a film that left most of that horror to the imagination. "Primate" leaves nothing to the imagination, as Ben bites, mauls, scratches, tears someone's face off, and, in the film's pièce de résistance, gives one of the entitled bros Lucy met on the plane just what's coming to him, tearing off his jaw with terrifying alacrity. Maybe because the chimpanzee is our closest and most highly developed animal relative, it's a kick to be reminded of how strong they are - not because they're made of muscle, but because those ape fingers are wired with the will of the jungle. Early on, Lucy and the others look like they might be characters of interest (there are a few playful scenes between Kotsur's Adam and his daughters), but "Primate" ends up reducing its humans to meat in bathing suits. It's part of the exploitation wink of it all, as is Ben's way of poking out of the shadows, which he always does at just the right moment to make a monkey out of us. Jump to Comments 'Primate' Review: A Pet Chimp Goes Ape in the First Simian-Next-Door Slasher Movie. It Gets Two-and-a-Half Bananas Reviewed at AMC Empire, New York, Jan. 7, 2026. MPA rating: R.