Primate answers the question of “What’s wrong with Ben?” more swiftly and simply than imagined. The second the lights dim, the film opens with a quick, and slightly bizarre, mini-history of rabies. It then leads straight into the first kill, a delicious bit of face-tearing brutality. That’s all before the title card drops. The swiftness makes it hard not to laugh at how hard the marketing played up the mystery of Ben’s rage.

Writer/director Johannes Roberts (The Strangers: Prey at Night)  is setting expectations. This isn’t a complicated story. We’re not getting deep. Primate is classic B-movie schlock in the grand tradition of Grizzly and Alligator. We’re gonna see a chimp go mad. Those teens are getting served up on a silver platter.

The setup is similarly simple as hell. Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) is returning home from college with a couple of pals. Her dad’s going to be away on business for her first weekend home, but sister Erin and their family chimp Ben are around. Ben’s a remnant from their deceased mother’s life as a linguistic researcher, but he’s essentially part of the family. Unfortunately, right before Pop heads out of town, they realize a stray mongoose got into Ben’s enclosure. Until the animal gets tested for disease, they decide to leave Ben locked up.

So, of course, the now frothing and deranged Ben is almost immediately let loose to cause chaos among the horny teens and 20-somethings.

Sequoyah is perfectly serviceable as Lucy. She’s likable enough, which is all a movie like Primate really requires. Her best friendship with pal Kate is played up ad nauseam (count how many times they hold their BFF necklaces up to the camera). We get right away these two and little sis Erin are the ones to root for. Everyone else is likely heading for the metaphorical woodchipper. 

I doubt anyone will have any complaints on that front, though, because these kids are cardboard cutouts. Lucy isn’t so much a protagonist as perfectly-protagonist-shaped. Her best friend is likewise best-friend-shaped. The bitchy frenemy proves perfectly frenemy-shaped. Each one slots into the plot exactly where and how they should, without requiring much thought. They make decisions exactly as moronic as you’d hope without veering too far into bone-headed idiocy, making it a delight to watch Ben pick them off.

In another film, this would be significantly more frustrating. For the kind of B-movie fare Primate is going for, though, it actually works surprisingly well. The film isn’t trying to be the next Longlegs or Hereditary. It’s not even trying to be the next M3GAN, which was significantly more self-aware of its absurdity. Primate is straightforward and fairly earnest by comparison.

None of this is to suggest the film is particularly outstanding by any stretch. Roberts and co-writer Ernest Riera have an occasionally clunky script. Where they excel is with the action and the horror, but everything in between ranges from wooden to trite. Even the opening definition of rabies could have used a bit of copyediting to hammer home what the audience actually needs to know. 

But this is a January horror movie in the when-animals-attack subgenre! Primate’s main objective is to be an original, fun, and gory good time that’s not asking you to think too hard and isn’t attempting to be anything it’s not. And here it succeeds. Just don’t take anyone still having traumatic flashbacks to Nope’s opening sequence.

Primate brings its terrifying opposable thumbs to theatres January 9.

Check out the Primate trailer below.