Review: Primate (2026)

Warning: This review will be heavy on the spoilers.  Not explicitly, but to really get to my main criticism of the film, I do have to talk a bit about some of the character deaths.  I will refrain from names, but after going back and forth with myself on how to get to the meat of the criticism, it is just easier to refer to what happens than try to allude.

Primate follows a Ben, a chimpanzee raised by a researcher and taught to sign.  Ben gets bitten and infected with rabies just as Lucy Pinborough (Johnny Sequoyah) arrives to visit her father Adam (Troy Kotsur) and sister Erin (Gia Hunter).  Her mother (who has died before the film starts) is the researcher who raised Ben and the family keeps him around as a kind of pet.  Joining Lucy on this family visit are her college friends Kate and Nick (Victoria Wyant and Benjamin Cheng) and college frenemy Hannah (Jessica Alexander).  Why are so many people visiting her family?  To increase the body count, of course!

This is a mean movie.  No Duh! you think to yourself, It's about a killer chimpanzee!  And you're not entirely wrong about that, but also not entire right.  This movie approaches the kills with a sense of brutality you don't see in too many horror movies.  It's not quite at Terrifier levels, but the first kill of the movie involves someone's entire face being ripped off and that isn't even the most extreme one.

I can appreciate a mean horror movie.  What I don't appreciate is one that wants to be hardcore while still remaining gutless.

Because that is a pervasive problem with the movie.  It wants to shock you with its kills - which, they are graphic and brutal - but it isn't going to dare do something like kill one of the core family members.  Every other person is very obviously a meatbag and every member of the family has script immunity that would make a freshman screenwriter blush.  The amount of attacks - from a rabid chimpanzee, I feel the need to note - that the family members survive with minimal damage borders on parody.

None of this breaks the movie, but it is frustrating for someone who frequently watches horror movies to see this film pull back in such an obvious way.  I'm not saying everyone has to die, but other than a bite one of them receives, everything is pretty much shrugged off, including one part where I am pretty sure all the fingers of one of the characters are bent backwards with an audible snap.

Compare this with one of the meatbag characters who, while getting the goriest kill of the movie (one that will make Best Of lists in the future, I am sure) also has a weirdly rapey buildup before getting to the kill.  Rapey from the chimp, I feel the need to note.  It is obviously meant to push boundaries, and I think others could write a dissertation on how to read that scene, but juxtaposed with what happens with the family, it feels like they are in two different movies.

Or possibly three different movies.  You'll notice Troy Kotsur, a deaf actor, plays the father.  You'd think this would play a more substantial part in the movie, but there is only one scene that really uses his inability to hear to up the tension.  He doesn't get much focus (he is away from the house for the bulk of the movie) but the scene hints at a much for interesting - and likely much more terrifying - version of this film.  It's a missed opportunity.

You'd think with all of these complaints, I'd hate the movie, but it's actually fairly solid.  The kills are great, there is just enough character development to make our characters feel like real people, and the CGI on the chimp is amazing.  It is just so tantalizingly close to being an even better version of itself.  I do think most horror movie fans will enjoy it, and I'd easily recommend it despite my critiques.

7 out of 10

Review: Anaconda (2025)

Reviewing this movie feels a little mean.  It's a perfectly fine film that accomplishes its modest goals and putting a full critical lens on it - which is entirely unnecessary yet here am I doing so - is a bit like being a bullying a small child.  So I will open by saying that this movie isn't bad, it just that it far too often settles for 'good enough' when it could have easily gone for good.

The movie follows a group of childhood friends as they decide to shoot an indie sequel/reimagining/remake of the 1997 so-bad-it's-good movie of the same name.  Griff (Paul Rudd) has acquired the rights to the film, and they set off to the Amazon with a dream and a hired snake owned by Santiago (Selton Mello) to fulfill a childhood dream of making movies together.

I do want to say that the friendship between Griff and Doug (Jack Black) is the best part of the movie.  While Kenny (Steve Zahn) and Claire (Thandiwe Newton) complete the friend group, the Griff/Doug pair is the heart of the film.  And Black and Rudd play it well - more than the movie or the script really call for.  Rudd especially is giving his character all sorts of shading - pay attention to the scene where he springs the idea of remaking the movie - and is the easy best in show.

Sadly, they are really the only ones given anything worthwhile by the script.  Zahn has a few funny bits, but is mostly sidelined while Newton only serves as a love interest and is criminally underused given what she is capable of.  Every other character is a cypher (though Mello does get a few great bits as the snake-handler) and it sucks because all of them have the potential to be funny the movie just doesn't care about them.

When the movie is focused on their poor attempts at making their version of Anaconda, it is at its best.  However, it moves away from that far too quickly and becomes an almost-cliche when it does.  Not only that, but the movie starts to drag in these parts, which is deadly for a feature as short as this one.  A mid-movie twist exists that I don't think surprised anyone, and still the movie continues on past that resolution (with a few meta-jokes about movie production thrown in that do help)

That might be the biggest sin of the film:  It has too many tonal shifts while still trying to play to a wide audience that is expecting a much purer comedy.  I don't know if it should've cut these plotlines out or found a way to better integrate them; maybe they had to cobble them together after substantially trimming the original script and this was the best they could do.

Again, the movie is acceptable.  I think most people will laugh and enjoy it, but I also think by the middle of the year most will have forgotten the majority of the movie.

5 out of 10.

Review: We Bury the Dead (2026)

A problem that many movies have today is that they are mis-marketed.  For example, if you saw the trailer for We Bury the Dead, the recently released Australian horror movie, you would assume that it is not only much more action-packed than the film actually is, but also much more traditional in story structure.  Which this movie is most assuredly not.

We begin in media res, with Ava (Daisy Ridley) flying to the Australian island of Tasmania to assist with a mass casualty event caused by US military experimentation.  The Tasmanian capital of Hobart and much of the surrounding population has been killed by a type of EMP, and Ava and others are going to help with disposal and to potentially find their own missing loved ones who lived in or were visiting the area - Ava's husband having been on a retreat  in the southern part of the island when the accident occurred.

Upon arrival, we hear rumors of some of the dead standing up, but not really alive.  This inspires fear and hope among those with loved ones in the areas, even if the military has a strict Kill on Site order for any of those that 'wake up.'  As the southern part of the island will be the last to be cleared, Ava gets the help of Clay (Brenton Thwaites) to sneak away from her group and try to get to the hotel her husband was staying at.

Now, the time between Ava arriving in Tasmania and her leaving to search for her husband is much longer than that summary would have you believe.  And that is where the marketing for this movie fails it.

This section of the movie is so essential to the story and, if you are not prepared for a protracted world- and character-building section of the film, then it will drive you crazy as it makes you wait for the zombies.  They are hinted at throughout, but the movie is in no rush to get to them.  Instead, we get character work from Ridley and Thwaites and see the monotony of the clean-up of such an event.

When we do eventually get to the zombies, they are worth the wait.  The sound they make is probably the best and the grossest sound for zombies I have come across, and I have seen far, far too many zombie films.  I won't spoil the sound, but it made both myself and the person I was watching the movie with turn away from the screen - it's that effective.

In a way, it's almost a bummer when the road trip part of the film starts.  We do see more zombies - with some fantastic makeup work - but it is at this point where the movie begins to fall into many of the cliches common to the genre.  When a third character is introduced, acting suspicious, I don't think anyone in the theater was surprised at the direction that the film took.  Which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but for something that had been decidedly different from most zombie films, seeing it devolve into the cliche is a bit disappointing.

However, the film still works surprisingly well.  While much slower-paced than expected, it tells a good story in unexpected ways, even if it does leave a few big questions unanswered.

7 out of 10

2026 Movie List

The Movies:
28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

Primate
We Bury the Dead