Troy Kotsur<\/a>, bringing much-needed warmth to a cold movie), and their pet chimpanzee Ben. She\u2019s brought a couple of friends for a little party while her author dad goes off to a book signing event, but they don\u2019t know that Ben was bitten by a rabid mongoose the night before, and, well, it\u2019s about to get weird. After Ben attacks, the teenagers strand themselves in the pool\u2014chimps can\u2019t swim\u2014and try to figure out how they can possibly escape the strong clutches of this killer primate.<\/p>\nRoberts struggles a bit with tone, crafting a single-location survival thriller that turns into a slasher movie with a chimp instead of Jason Voorhees. To say that Ben is irrationally smart in his stalking of these teenagers would be an understatement, but this is the kind of film that demands suspension of disbelief, something that\u2019s easier to do at FF than it might be on Paramount+. I don\u2019t mind giving into a movie\u2019s concept if it\u2019s executing it well, but I kept finding myself outside of \u201cPrimate,\u201d trying to figure out things like why this million-dollar home doesn\u2019t have an alarm with a panic button. It\u2019s a product of slack pacing in the middle, which is really just killing time before the flesh-rending chaos of the final act. That\u2019s when \u201cPrimate\u201d truly reigns.<\/p>\n
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/BRIDE_OF_REANIMATOR_Still-jpg.webp.webp\")
<\/p>\n
Another story of evolutionary violence unfolds in Brian Yuzna\u2019s insane \u201cBride of Re-Animator,\u201d a movie that\u2019s even wackier than you remember in a new 4K restoration. A sequel to Stuart Gordon\u2019s brilliant 1985 film \u201cRe-Animator,\u201d this one doesn\u2019t replicate the Lovecraftian tension of the original, but that\u2019s a high bar to meet. It works better than many \u201980s and \u201890s horror sequels by virtue of Yuzna and writers Woody Keith & Rick Fry\u2019s willingness to go where most Hollywood movies refuse to go. It\u2019s not every day you see a flying head with bat wings or an arm & a leg fused together and become sentient and homicidal. And don\u2019t forget the creature that\u2019s just an eyeball with five fingers for legs. (\u201cAlien: Earth\u201d inspiration, maybe?) It\u2019s really clunky at times, but it\u2019s impossible not to admire the sheer ridiculousness of \u201cBride of Re-Animator,\u201d and Austin was the perfect place to re-launch it.<\/p>\n
Loosely based on episodes of the serialized story Herbert West-Reanimator by H.P. Lovecraft, \u201cBride of Re-Animator\u201d catches up with Herbert West (Jeffrey Combs) and Dan Cain (Bruce Abbott), continuing to play God. Dan is still apprehensive, grieving the loss of Meg from the first movie and the imminent death of a patient he\u2019s become attached to, but West is full Frankenstein, seeing every human body as potential grist for his mill. Combs is wonderfully deranged in this movie, getting laughs from the FF crowd with some of his memorable line readings that sometimes make him look like Jim Carrey played a mad scientist. He\u2019s the best thing about the movie, but he\u2019s surrounded by an ensemble that rarely matches his temperature. Abbott is a particularly flat performer.<\/p>\n
What\u2019s not flat is the make-up and effects work that looks even better in 4K. When \u201cBride of Re-Animator\u201d gets to its super-bloody final scenes, the entire movie feels unhinged in a way that can be best appreciated at Fantastic Fest. <\/p>\n
May there be at least 20 more years of this kind of chaos.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Fantastic Fest, a wonderfully inclusive and unpredictable event every September in Austin, turns 20 this year. To launch…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":155820,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":["post-155819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155819","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=155819"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/155819\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/155820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=155819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=155819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=155819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}