The first movie out of the gate for 2026, Paramount‘s Primate, is not a very encouraging start for the year, nor is it a good start for the first full year Skydance has been in charge of one of Hollywood’s great legacy studios. The film actually begins with that famous Paramount mountain logo and underneath saying “A Skydance Company.”
This horror mashup looks more like an indie-level attempt to take an exploitable idea and run it into the ground with one novel way after another to chop up a teenage cast. Its key villain is not a Freddy or Jason or Michael Myers but it might as well have been in the by-the-numbers screenplay from director Johannes Roberts and Ernest Riera. The plot revolves around the terrifying takeover of the family pet, a teddy bear-hugging chimpanzee named Ben. The 89-minute running time doesn’t allow much exposition, and in fact the opening sequence shows a veterinarian coming to treat a sickly Ben before having his face viciously torn off. Lovely.
Cut to 36 hours earlier and we are on an airplane where college student Lucy (Johnny Squoyah) is coming back home to Hawaii (the filming location in the UK stands in for the islands) after being away a year. She brings along new college buddy Hannah (Jessica Alexander), and there is also her younger sister Erin (Gia Hunter) in the mix. She reunites with dad Adam (Troy Kotsur of CODA fame), who is grieving the loss of their mother and his wife who had worked in connecting humans and chimpanzees with sign language and brought Ben home when he was just a baby. Lucy reconnects with lovable Ben, however briefly, before something goes very, very wrong.
Nevertheless it is party time at the pool as Hannah’s longtime BFF Kate (Victoria Wyant) shows up, as does Nick (Benjamin Cheng) who she secretly has always crushed on. Adam has to go away on business (he is a bestselling author) and so the teens have the place to themselves with Ben, who it turns out has rabies, turning him into a monster who meticulously stalks his prey Jason Voorhees style. Therefore Primate and its promising central character turns more into a typical slasher flick, repeatedly knocking off the swimsuit-wearing teens one by one, his specialty being yanking out jaws and other bloody grossouts. This is a very calculating monkey. A couple of these sequences are amusing, especially when two clueless and drunk teens drop by, and also when one of the victims mistakenly locks herself in the wrong car to get away only to discover Ben has the keys.
There really isn’t much more than this. The cast is attractive and certainly knows how to scream on cue. Oscar winner Kotsur is a welcome if underused presence, but he does get his moments toward the end. Also the script cleverly works in the actor’s deafness in a scene when he returns but can’t hear his daughter’s primal screams.
Roberts is basically a one-trick pony as a filmmaker, at least based on his filmography, with his most successful horror picture the surprise indie hit 47 Meters Down, and he is clearly into this kind of subject matter. He says his inspiration was the film version of Stephen King’s Cujo, the big difference being the killer St. Bernard is here a chimp. Give the filmmakers props for shooting much of this in-camera rather than CGI, and also for the realistic grisly performance of the actor in the all-purpose monkey suit, Miguel Torres Umba.
Because they chose to name their villain Ben, perhaps after the infamous deadly title killer rat star of the 1972 horror thriller Ben, the director really misses the boat by not ironically including Michael Jackson’s poignant Oscar-nominated Valentine “Ben” on the soundtrack. This chimp really needs a love song.
Producers are Walter Hamada, John Hodges and Bradley Pilz.
Title: Primate
Distributor: Paramount
Release date: January 9, 2026
Director: Johannes Roberts
Screenwriters: Johannes Roberts and Ernest Rier
Cast: Johnny Sequoyah, Jessica Alexander, Troy Kotsur, Victoria Wyant, Gia Hunter, Benjamin Cheng,
Charlie Mann, Tienne Simon, Miguel Torres Umba
Rating: R
Running time: 1 hr 29 mins