Primate (MA) – 89 minutes

A creature feature with bite, Primate is about a pet chimp in Hawaii that contracts rabies and “goes ape”.

The film starts with a brutal attack on a veterinarian.

Then we cut to 36 hours earlier.

That is when college student Lucy boards a plane to return to her native Hawaii, which is where her younger sister, Erin and father, Adam live.

It is a beautiful, open plan home, embedded into a cliff, and includes an underground swimming pool.

Joining Lucy are her long-time friends Kate and Nick, while Kate has unexpectedly invited Hannah.

Lucy and Erin’s father is a successful deaf novelist who communicates in sign language.

His wife (the girls’ mother), a linguistics professor, passed away from cancer the previous year.

She taught highly intelligent pet Ben to interact using custom soundboard software.

Only that night, Ben begins to act strangely.

Adam finds a dead mongoose in his enclosure and discovers that Ben has been bitten by it.

The next day, as Adam is attending a book signing, all hell breaks loose.

Ben goes on the rampage.

While I can’t say Primate is the most highly intelligent film I have come across, it is tense and, at times, scary and gory.

It is the work of director Johannes Roberts, who co-wrote the screenplay with Ernest Riera.

They keep turning the screws, leaving us – the audience – squirming.

For all the young adults’ resourcefulness, Ben invariably has the upper hand.

With that, the body count grows. It is just a question of when.

In that regard, Primate follows a familiar route for the genre.

In other words, who – if anyone – will be left standing? 

Visually, the house where the action is set is a real head turner.

Something puzzled me about the chimp though.

At first, Ben seemed cute and relatively small, but the moment he went feral, he appeared to grow in not only ferocity, but in size and stance.

As you would expect, the cast goes through the motions of being youngsters caught in a terrifying situation.

So, do any of them survive?

You will have to buy a ticket to Primate to find out.

Rated MA, it scores a 6½ out of 10.