Knock on Wood

The monster movie is a lost art. Largely gone are the days of the simple, stripped-down story of a group forced to survive against a nigh-unbeatable creature, in favor of stock franchise entries like Jurassic World Rebirth and Meg 2: The Trench. This January, writer/director Johannes Roberts seeks to change the status quo.

Roberts, whose previous credits include The Strangers: Prey at Night, Resident Evil: Welcome to Raccoon City, and both 47 Meters Down films, has proven competent at staging tense and compelling creature action, and his new film, Primate, perfectly plays to those strengths.

In addition to being a fairly straightforward monster movie, Primate is a slasher, but instead of a machete-wielding maniac, this killer is a chimp infected with a nasty strain of rabies. Johnny Sequoyah (Dexter: New Blood) stars as Lucy, a young woman who returns home to Hawaii after a breakup. Her homecoming coincides with a rare infection corrupting her family’s highly intelligent pet chimp, Ben, and with her father (CODA’s Troy Kotsur) gone for the night and her friends in party mode, the stage is set for a murderous rampage.

It’s all largely bound to a single location (the family’s lush cliffside home), and with a shocking amount of gore and violence, you can tell just how happy this movie is to exist. There’s a clear reverence to killer primate movies of old (see: Monkey Shines), but also a knowing glee, like the film itself can’t believe it’s getting away with everything it’s able to show you. Even when performers like Sequoyah are screaming their lungs out, you can tell they’re having a blast, and if that isn’t an obvious experience enhancement, I don’t know what is.

The biggest issue with Primate is, at least when it comes to its target demographic, a feature and not a bug. The film’s main focus is the ape-inflicted carnage, and after some barebones character building at the start, everything except a singular goal (driven by a ticking clock) and well-timed humor takes a backseat to the “picking one off at a time” slasher formula. Character is the cornerstone of a good story, but let’s be honest here…nobody’s coming to Primate for the hero’s journey. We’re here to watch a bunch of incompetent young adults get slaughtered by a killer chimpanzee, and as long as we understand why the characters do what they do, everything else falls into place by premise alone.

Primate is also able to elevate itself above most stock slashers by ensuring that Ben, the titular Primate, is a proper character. He’s a clever rascal who (despite his uncontrollable homicidal urges) consistently toes the line between abjectly cruel and incredibly sympathetic. The physicality, courtesy of actor Miguel Torres Umba (who, according to Sequoyah, couldn’t hear or speak through the animatronics within the chimp head, reducing him to primal interactions when he was in costume), is excellent, and it goes a long way to make him terrifying.

I wish I could say that the monster movies are back in full swing, but for now, Primate will have to do. It has the atmosphere of a classic creature feature, only this one has the benefits of 21st-century technology and studio-sponsored production value. It’s also an unexpected laugh riot, often combining scares and humor in a delightfully dark duality. There’s no fluff nor fat, just tension, gore, and creature action that had me grinning for 89 minutes straight.

Primate opens in theaters nationwide January 9, 2026.