Primate

Movie monsters come in all shapes and sizes, but they’re rarely as diminutive and deceptively cuddly as the pet chimp-turned-brainy-hell​-beast in this endearingly daft B-movie​ horror.

Because for a portion of its runtime, Primate feels a bit like Jaws if instead of a great white shark, Steven Spielberg and co had plumped for a peckish sea bass – or Samuel L Jackson had starred in ‘Snake on a Plane’. Can one modestly sized ape really rain down gory terror on a group of grown-up humans, and do for chimps what Stephen King’s Cujo did for mountain rescue dogs? 

Well, kinda. With cleverly claustrophobic staging in a walled clifftop house, director and co-writer Johannes Roberts (47 Metres Down) smartly mines the premise for thrills. Though rarely scary, Primate is tense, unpretentious fun. Its antagonist (played by movement specialist Miguel Torres Umba and augmented with VFX) is menacing enough to make you see why a group of swimsuited teens would feel outmatched – especially after a spliff or two. Beneath that fur, after all, this little ape is as hench as peak Stallone.

The mayhem unfolds at the Hawaiian home of Coda Oscar winner Troy Kotsur’s crime novelist, Adam. The pet chimp, Ben, has been inherited from his late wife, a linguistics professor who’d been teaching it to communicate with humans. When Adam is called away on a book tour, his daughters Erin (Gia Hunter) and Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah), and a few vacationing pals, are left to hold the fort.

You could do worse than spend 90 blood-soaked minutes with not-so-gentle Ben

Before someone can say: ‘Wait, can chimps get rabies?’, the chimp is bitten by a rogue mongoose and gets rabies. Here the pathogen manifests more like 28 Days Later’s Rage virus married with a sudden hundred-point IQ uplift. Ben is swiftly attacking and outsmarting the petrified teens in the pool, taunting them with the tablet he’s been taught to communicate with and ripping the attractive cast’s faces off.

There are some generic characters in Roberts and Ernest Riera’s screenplay, with resourceful scream queens and doofus jocks all vying for the nastiest death scene and only Sequoyah making much of an impression. Although it is refreshing to see a horror movie – any movie – with a deaf character where, barring one scene, the disability isn’t the focus. (Albeit, Kotsur’s crime writer is sidelined for a chunk for the film.)

Still, there’s fun to be had in watching this furry psycho going ape. For brain-free Friday night viewing, you could do much worse than spend 90 blood-soaked minutes with not-so-gentle Ben.

In US theaters now. In UK and Ireland cinemas Fri Jan 30.