Here’s the short version: Primate is a killer chimpanzee movie. You know the kind of films that the studios release in mid-January, and you should plan according to your tastes.

Let’s start the long version with a true story. Travis was a 13-year-old pet chimpanzee living with Sandra Herold in Connecticut in 2009. One day, seeing Herold’s friend Charla Nash pick up his Elmo doll, Travis flew into a rage and ate her face and hands. I mention this incident, which made international headlines at the time, for two reasons. First and foremost, because clearly nobody should ever keep a chimpanzee as a pet. Secondly, because it does make an obvious set-up for a violent home invasion thriller in which a maturing pet chimp tries to murder its owners. That thriller is Johannes Roberts’ Primate, which opens tomorrow in Australian cinemas after making its premiere at Fantastic Fest last September.

A rampaging chimpanzee has been used for horror films before, notably in Jordan Peele’s hugely effective Nope in 2022. There it was a smaller detail in a much broader film; here it is the main attraction. College student Lucy (Johnny Sequoyah) returns home to Hawaii in the wake of her mother’s death from cancer, reuniting with sister Erin (Gia Hunter), deaf father Adam (Troy Kotsur), and their chimpanzee Ben (played by Miguel Torres Umba in a practical suit; commendably the film does not use an actual animal). While Adam, a successful author – and we are talking Dan Brown level going by their lavish cliffside mansion – goes on a brief book tour, Lucy and her friends relax by the pool. Meanwhile Ben has been bitten by a rabid mongoose and is rapidly turning violent and insane.

This is not a long film, running just a shade under 90 minutes. It is not a complex one, either. One assumes each character was selected from a catalogue of stereotypes, and even that minimal level of depth is abandoned once the ape starts rampaging. When the number of survivors gets a little low, the film simply has some more unwittingly turn up at the house.

It is a common formula for a slasher flick, but it struggles to hit the expected conventions and fails to introduce anything more inventive in return. Anybody that has seen a Friday the 13th film has seen Jason Voorhees violently murder a string of drug-taking, over-sexed teenagers. Here there is no real sense of moral justice – that is, unlike the wayward youths screwing on Jason’s lawn, the protagonists here do not deserve what they get. One also never really feels sorry for Jason in a Friday movie. That is not the case here, although the film seemingly goes out of its way to ignore that Ben is a frightened, mistreated wild animal who should never have been in the house in the first place.

The rabies angle is a weird one, and is presumably introduced to enable the human characters to take shelter in the backyard pool. For one thing, there is no rabies in Hawaii, which the film points out but then never justifies why in this case there is. For another, chimpanzees cannot typically swim anyway.

It is a perversely dark film, not in tone but in lighting. Presumably the aim was to keep Ben in the shadows where the costume would be more effective. It also obfuscates all but a few of the film’s goriest moments, leading to a lot of screaming and crunching in the dark. Any viewer seeking the vicarious enjoyment of blood and gore – surely a key market for this sort of violent animal rampage – is going to be sorely disappointed.

It is nice to see Oscar winner and deaf actor Troy Kotsur turn up in a key supporting role, but hopefully he will be offered some more challenging material too. It would be a shame if this was the only place his award recognition led.

If “chimpanzee rampage in a rich family’s backyard” sounds like it might appeal, there’s a proper chance that it might. One must not be too picky, though. The chimpanzee rampages, but there is a lot of potential that goes untapped.