Prime Time: Primal Rage (1988)

You can be forgiven if you haven’t heard of Primal Rage before now. I certainly hadn’t heard of it until a friend messaged me about it just a few days ago. Then I wondered how it had stayed off my radar for so long. Perhaps it was the generic title, two words that feel as if they have been mashed together at least a dozen times for a dozen different movies (there’s certainly at least one more recent film with the exact same title). Perhaps it was the fact that the plot was buried by a certain other horror movie that used the same starting point to go in a wildly different direction.

There's a lab in which some monkeys are being tested with some kind of rage virus. One monkey escapes a cage and bites a man who is there trying to investigate the situation, and that starts off a chain of events that will lead to more people being attacked, and the virus spreading. Which is going to make the upcoming Halloween party quite a lively one.

Directed by Vittorio (son of Carlo) Rambaldi, making his feature debut, this is hugely entertaining nonsense. The runtime is a perfectly-paced 90 minutes (give or take), the characters are memorable enough to identify throughout, but not so good that you would mourn them if they succumbed to the effects of the virus, and there is a fun third act that brings all of the main characters together for a violent confrontation that shows off some more of the makeup and effects that have been utilised well throughout the rest of the film.

The script, written by Umberto Lenzi and James Justice (credited together as Harry Kirkpatrick), is as silly as you want it to be. Our hero is a bit smug, but the featured bullies (yes, there are Neanderthal bullies) are so despicable that you automatically keep rooting against them, and the two featured female leads are good enough to hold your attention.

Patrick Lowe and Mitch Watson play their roles in a way that makes you wish more charismatic performers were chosen (especially true in the case of Lowe, who is the nominal hero of the piece), but Cheryl Arutt and Sarah Buxton help to make things more watchable, and Doug Sloan is a great presence in the role of Lovejoy aka leader of the bullies. There’s also a fun turn from Bo Svenaon as Ethridge, an unethical scientist, and at least one fake monkey has a feature role in one of the most memorable scenes.

I had even more fun with this than I thought I would. It sets up the plot and characters briskly enough, leaving plenty of time to have fun with the main concept (as well as also having time to insert scenes with a sleazy professor being sleazy). Who would have thought that a film about rage-infected monkeys spreading a virus to unfortunate humans would be so good? 

7/10

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