Right from its opening scrawl — which confidently asserts that rabid animals are “literally driven crazy” by the sight of water — Johannes Roberts’ Primate inserts itself into the grand tradition of moron horror. That’s by no means a bad thing. Half the fun of B-movies with A-budgets is stupid characters bumbling through fantastical scenarios en route to certain doom. Roberts’ Instagram-infographic-as-science approach helps establish his clockwork concept, in which a pet chimpanzee goes bananas on its teenage owners. The film is rife with tongue-in-cheek thrills and violent charms, as though that one scene in Nope were turned into its own feature. But it’s also strung together haphazardly, and wields hefty imagery and clashing tones it doesn’t quite know how to handle.
