When Lucy’s (Johnny Sequoyah) pet chimpanzee gets rabies, her homecoming party turns into the bloodiest night of apes since Night of the Bloody Apes.

After directing the shark-attack flicks 47 Meters Down and 47 Meters Down: Uncaged, Johannes Roberts swaps ripping off Jaws for ripping off jaws in this chimpan-B movie about Ben, played by movement specialist Miguel Torres Umba. And while monkey costumes have come a long way since the 1976 King Kong, if anything the attitude towards apes appears to have gone backwards. You could argue the same for shark films but they are at least predators. Primate feels so unfair on chimps that one can only assume Andy Serkis was once rude to Roberts at a party.

To stop us feeling bad for Ben, Roberts makes him more demonically possessed than rabid, sadistically toying with his victims and pressing on a soundboard to say “Lucy bad” and “Dead” over and over again. I guess it’s easier to make the chimp evil than making the human characters likeable, but this approach means we care about neither Ben nor his prey. Most of the victims are indistinguishable girls in wet clothes, although the first person to get their face ripped off is Rob Delaney, in the grand tradition of UK-based comedians unleashing deadly monkey viruses, following in the footsteps of David Schneider in 28 Days Later.

Primate also has more plot holes than you can shake a banana at. Lucy’s parents are a writer and a professor, but for some reason they live in a sort of Bond villain lair embedded into a cliff. It also exploits the dad’s (Troy Kotsur) deafness by making him unable to hear when Ben is sneaking up on him, even though you would expect a rabid chimp covered in human blood to have of a scent of some kind, maybe something similar to the smell on a night bus.

If you can overlook the film’s laziness, speciesism and sexism, there are some well-directed moments, and Roberts doesn’t skimp on the jaw-based gore. But the whole thing is so mean-spirited and humourless that by the time we get to Lucy whacking her pet chimpanzee with a spade, you can’t help but wonder whether unironically making an apesploitation movie in 2026 was such a good idea.