Primate (2025)

Premise: I know, I know, it’s hacky and literally everyone has summarized the movie like this, but, really: “what if Cujo, but also that scene with the chimpanzee on Nope?”

Under 90 minutes? A minute under that!
Do they say the title? Nah, but they say “chimp” a lot and for some reason it feels like a slur.

First thing I thought of:

Okay, more: Yeah, this is a fun movie. It has a lot of very black humour, it is ridiculously gory at times, it also doesn’t commit the cardinal sin I thought it was going to commit: spending too much time with the chimpanzee before the rabies hits to make you feel guilty about the poor little guy. Don’t get me wrong: they do show the little guy being a cute friendly dude for a few minutes, but the movie is not really about feeling sorry for him.
I never watched Cujo but I did read the book back in the day and our friend Richard Bachman (using his nom de plume Phteve King) made sure to suckerpunch you right by the end by basically saying “no matter what, Cujo was a good boy and at no point was any of this his fault”.
This doesn’t happen here and although I felt a bit sorry for the poor little guy, I don’t think the movie was trying to do that in any way. So, hey, good job, that was fun and surprisingly graphic at times!

A simple way to improve it: There are a couple of death scenes where the camera looks away and I don’t know why. It is surprising because there’s this specific kill that is brutal and shown in glorious gory detail. I regressed to my twelve year old self and I was hooting and hollering here. And then there was slapstick, like, as part of the gory stuff. Maybe more of that would have been tiring, but what if a little more of that, for me?

Trivia about the IMDb trivia:

Hawaii is the only state that has no rabies because, as islands, they have strict testing/quarantining measures. The rare occasion for rabies has been bats on shipments (but still no animals to make it to the land.)

Now, you might think “ah, this is interesting trivia, why is my favourite blog complaining about it?”, and I would normally say “my friend, you’re correct, I didn’t know this”.
Except.

• The movie literally addresses this point on screen. As in, there is dialogue about this.
• This wasn’t listed on the “trivia” section, it was listed on the “factual errors and goofs” section.

Seriously, some people hate liking things and that must be so exhausting.