Primate (2025) review

Here's one for the late night stoner crowd who want to watch a dude in an ape costume: college student Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) returns to her native Hawaii - along with her friend Kate (Victoria Wyant) and Kate's gal pal Hannah (Jessica Alexander) - to stay with her sister Erin (Gia Hunter) and deaf father Adam (Troy Kotsur), except Ben, the chimpanzee who lives there, has become rabid from being bitten by a mongoose.  The house where all the action takes place is wonderfully designed (although who puts a swimming pool so close to the edge of a cliff?), but the movie is basically a dopey amalgamation of teen romance and numerous horror movies (Roberts admits that Cujo was an influence, but there are others he's clearly "borrowing from") and turned into an unintentionally hilarious joke: I was completely sober when watching it, but anyone with a trace of THC in their body will fall over laughing at its sheer stupidity.  It's good that they found a job for hearing-impaired actor Kotsur - who won an Academy Award for CODA - but I wish it was for a less exploitative role ... and the entire time I kept rooting for Ben to keep ripping jaws off of Gen Z's self-proclaimed "rizzlers."