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Primate: The Rabid Chimp Movie We Can’t Unsee · Brainwaves

0:08
Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to another exciting episode of Two
0:12
Shot Tuesday. But it's not just another
0:14
episode. My name is Jason Riley with me
0:17
as always, Barry T Nixon. And as often we've got the movie
0:22
guy, Rob Pete. So you know something special is
0:25
happening. How are you doing, Rob?
0:26
Yeah, pretty good. We went and saw a movie.
0:28
So that's why I'm here. I'm I'm here because we saw a
0:32
movie. Fantastic.
0:33
And not just any movie, but we're going to get into that.
0:36
We'll get into that. Barry, how are you doing?
0:39
This is the pleasantries portion of our show.
0:41
Yeah, I'm doing quite well, Jay, and thank you for having me back
0:45
week after week. Happy to have you here.
0:49
I do have some exciting. News.
0:50
Truly, I have an exciting some news I want to share at some
0:53
point in the episode, not related to the movie, but only
0:56
because it's one of those you think everyday things that I
1:00
don't know has ever happened to me before.
1:01
So I'll just leave it there and we'll get to that whenever you
1:04
want either to kick off or at the end.
1:06
But first, we have a format on the show and that is two shots
1:09
of anything you'd like. Rob, what are you starting out
1:12
with tonight? Well, because we went and saw a
1:14
movie and the movie involved rabies.
1:17
I'm gonna take a take a shot of rabies vaccine just directly
1:21
directly into the mouth. Good mark otherwise.
1:24
Barry, what have you got? I got some whiskey.
1:26
What kind? Some good whiskey.
1:28
It's the 12 year Bushmills my friend.
1:30
One of your favorites, and I don't, I don't want to miss a
1:33
moment of this movie. You'll explain what it is after
1:35
we do our shot. So I'm keeping a sober show.
1:37
I'm going to have some nice PC spring water with some orange
1:42
squeezy in there. Some Kool-aid squeezy.
1:45
Right on, gentlemen. Cheers.
1:47
Cheers. Chin, chin that is bitter.
1:53
But you won't get rabies, unlike who you're going to tell us.
1:57
Barry, Why don't you kick us off?
1:58
What did you see? This we saw Primate and at the
2:03
time of this recording it is still in theaters.
2:05
However, by the time our audience consumes this episode,
2:09
it may well be on demand. Now that's not really a shot at
2:11
the movie because I actually had a good time.
2:14
Rob has a different take and that's part of why we love
2:16
having them. We are truly the Ying and the
2:19
Yang of almost every film that we've ever gone to see together
2:22
in the theaters. But this is the basically an
2:24
update of the Cujo story, but instead of a Saint Bernard run
2:28
amok, we now have a once friendly house ape run amok.
2:33
A chimp. A chimp named.
2:35
A chimp named. Ben.
2:36
Ben. Ben.
2:39
Ben, Ben the chimp. And he starts off sweet as pie,
2:42
but it doesn't take very long, right, Rob?
2:44
Probably about, I don't know, 90 seconds because, you know,
2:48
there's a pretty gruesome death that starts right away and then
2:52
we kind of catch up. Well, it's more of a backtrack.
2:55
You know, we kind of flash in the past 12 hours to the lead up
2:59
of this. But Rob, what was your
3:01
impression of it, At least the the beginning portion?
3:05
Yeah, I mean, they, they, so the movie starts actually with with
3:08
like a readout saying like chimps can actually get rabies.
3:11
So I'm like, OK, so you're telling us the the the the chimp
3:14
has rabies. So now we know we don't have to
3:16
think we can just go into the movie and just know that the
3:20
chimp is going to get rabies. OK, so I thought that was a bit
3:23
a bit silly. I because, and I'll tell you
3:25
why. As the movie progressed, I
3:27
started to realize that there may have been this might have
3:29
been a 2 hour movie that they cut down to an hour and a half.
3:32
And in doing so, they removed the whole he's got rabies plot
3:36
line. Because there was a couple of
3:37
moments in the movie where I don't want to get into the but
3:42
there's that the father is like sends a sample of the Mongoose
3:45
that bit the the chimp to get it tested and and he gets a call
3:51
saying that or gets a text saying that it might be rabies
3:56
or something. But that's well into the movie
3:58
as well into it. And by that .1 of the teenagers
4:00
has always said oh has already said it's got rabies.
4:03
So like I just feel like they were at some point, like they
4:06
could have exposed it over time and let us feel figure out that
4:10
it was rabies instead or make it a little mystical to get to the
4:14
rabies part. But they didn't.
4:16
They just gave you rabies and off I just.
4:18
Want to jump in real quick, Jay, you laughed at the Mongoose.
4:20
The story takes place in Hawaii, so we can assume that Mongoose.
4:25
Is. They live in Hawaii.
4:26
They do, yeah. OK.
4:28
So that's it's not, you know, Oakville ON it's Hawaii.
4:32
And they can also get rabies. Do they specify that at the
4:35
beginning of the movie? I believe Mongoose can actually
4:37
get rabies. I don't think you know because I
4:38
don't want to tell you that the Mongoose got rabies first.
4:41
That would be great. But they every time they came
4:43
up, they were like, chimps can get rabies, Mongoose can get
4:46
rabies, humans can get rabies. Well, they defined rabies too,
4:49
as a madness disease that any any creature infected, the mere
4:54
sight of water sends them into a rage.
4:57
Is that true? That's what the movie started
4:59
with. I don't remember I'm.
5:00
Not sure about the whole water, Yeah.
5:03
Anytime it looks at water, it goes crazy.
5:06
And as with the movie goes on Ben, every time he goes to this
5:08
beautiful pool, he goes nuts every time he sees the water.
5:12
But is that a true symptom of rabies?
5:14
Like I just did that at. The beginning of the film, that
5:16
was. I believe that the the text at
5:18
the beginning of the movie that Rob alluded to.
5:20
And you didn't look that up, Barry.
5:21
You didn't want to. You weren't like, I need to go
5:22
deeper. I was all.
5:23
Bought in the world. I was completely bought in.
5:26
I was like, what? Yeah, that sounds.
5:27
Right. The idea was that the was that
5:29
Ben, the chimp chimps don't really swim.
5:32
I thought that was the reason he wasn't, he was hanging around
5:35
the pool is because he wanted to get in and kill the people that
5:37
were hiding in the pool. He did.
5:39
Want to, but he can't swim and he also has rabies and he can't
5:44
drink water without going nuts. So it's it's.
5:46
A2 prong thing so Ben was very fusion lies the prong was.
5:50
Very complex. Yeah, it was.
5:52
It was heavy. So many in so many outs.
5:54
It sounds like Ben targeted people.
5:57
Was Ben targeting people at the pool you said?
5:59
I'm curious. Yeah, but so Ben basically the,
6:02
the basic premise is that Ben is the is the is the family pet,
6:06
right? Kind of is like a they're
6:08
they're like high. Intelligent though he's a hyper
6:11
intelligent. Zoologist and stuff, that's what
6:13
the family is. Yeah, yeah, so.
6:15
So they kind of have a pet chimp and he has his own enclosure and
6:19
stuff. But yes, he gets bitten by a
6:21
Mongoose and goes nuts just as one of the daughters has come
6:23
back from From. From More.
6:26
Perfect, Yeah. From living in the US proper, I
6:29
don't know, whatever. And so she comes back and and
6:32
that's when it all kind of breaks down and they the first
6:35
thing they do is get into the water by the pool once they
6:39
figure out this is what's happening because chimps can't
6:41
swim. So get in the water, he can't
6:43
attack us. And that's where they stay for a
6:45
large chunk of the movie where, you know, and they sometimes
6:47
will get out to try to try to like, get a phone or do various
6:51
things, right. So yeah, that's really the movie
6:53
is watching that all take place and.
6:56
It's all one location. It's all like this beautiful
6:58
house on a cliffside in on the Big Island of Hawaii.
7:02
Almost surrealistically so. Like, I'm not sure that that
7:04
place could could even really exist, but yeah.
7:06
Well, it's good if you had, if you were a billionaire, I think.
7:09
I mean that pool alone like it was like.
7:11
It was an Infinity pool on the edge of like like a Hitchcockian
7:16
style Cliff edge. It was a bit over the top
7:19
beautiful. Very nice.
7:20
Yeah, I I sense maybe. It's on Airbnb, we should look
7:22
it. Up.
7:23
I sense at some point in this movie, The movie lost both.
7:26
So at what point did you find yourself drawn out of this
7:30
movie? I could just sense it from the
7:31
way you're describing it. It's a 90 minute runtime.
7:33
What about? 90 about nice and lean.
7:36
Did you did win for me? I mean, I wasn't dipped out.
7:39
I, you know, it was, it was enough to hold my attention, but
7:42
mostly to see if it was going to do all the things I thought it
7:44
was going to do, which is just do a basic classic horror movie
7:48
plot line where the people, the teenagers, quote UN quote, get
7:51
picked off 1 by 1 until there's a one or two survivors left.
7:55
And that's exactly what happened.
7:56
So there was no humor in it. There was no Cocaine Bear.
7:59
There was nothing like that. Yeah, that's true.
8:02
There was no humor, but there was a deaf father, which both
8:05
Rob and I were wondering why they made that choice to make.
8:08
Like the dad, the guy who built the enclosure, he's sort of a
8:11
famous dude. He's getting his story turned
8:14
into a movie. That's all we really know about
8:16
him. And then he can hear.
8:18
And so I don't know why they chose to do that.
8:21
Rob, you and I were talking about that on the way home.
8:22
It was like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I.
8:24
Knew. I knew that it was a plot
8:25
device. I don't know.
8:27
Yeah, I realized. I realized pretty Yeah, they
8:29
did. At the end.
8:30
I realized it was a plot device. The plot device is that he's the
8:33
guy that finally gets home because he figures out kind of
8:35
what might be going on. Yeah, because he's the one
8:38
that's sending the text about the rabies, and he's the one
8:40
that sent the the the Mongoose off.
8:42
Right. Well, he's on his book tour.
8:44
Yeah, he's on his book tour, though.
8:45
He he's at a Barnes and Noble and he's, he's got this movie,
8:47
he's got a line up full of people and they're talking to
8:50
him and he can't hear. Him.
8:50
You'd think there was more to this movie that they kind of cut
8:53
out, but he ends up. Playing they're probably.
8:55
Yeah, he ends up, he ends up sign.
8:56
Language. Not all, but some.
8:58
Yeah, this, this shows up. So there you go.
9:00
So there was some of that. Yeah, but it it dropped it very
9:03
quickly because the chimp became like a crazy, I'm a chimp, want
9:07
to kill now? Yes.
9:08
So it wasn't doing much signing after a kill or two, you know.
9:12
Well. Yeah, it's true.
9:14
It gave up on trying to communicate.
9:16
It just felt it would show its love through throwing boulders
9:19
at you or trying to rip your face off.
9:21
And there was lots of that. There was 1 scene where a guy's
9:24
jaw was removed, the chimp pulled the jaw apart and then
9:27
tried to eat it. That's quite funny.
9:30
Yeah, I don't know if it was funny.
9:31
I had to look away. It was kind of gross.
9:33
Let's look towards shot #2 because I think that's what we
9:36
need to do so we can continue to understand this movie and break
9:39
it apart and see if it's going to be an instant cinema classic.
9:42
Barry, what have you got for shot #2?
9:44
I'm sticking with the whiskey here, Jay.
9:46
Rob. Bushmills 12 year.
9:48
There's more of this. Me too, cheers.
9:52
Cheers. That was less bitter.
9:56
I think I'm getting used to it, yeah. 2nd dose that's important.
9:59
Now you're safe from rabies. I don't know even questions to
10:03
ask about this. I I can like I wit like this
10:06
seems like a movie that would be perfect for comedy.
10:08
Like why not? Yeah.
10:10
Some jokes it does. Feel like, well, let's just talk
10:13
about this for a second. The, the, the chimp itself is
10:15
not CG. It's, it's a fully practical
10:18
effect. It is nice.
10:20
However, to me it was just a little guy in a pimp costume the
10:22
whole time, so there was nothing scary about that to me.
10:25
I just pictured a small person in a chimp costume.
10:28
The head was way too big for a chimp.
10:30
Head it. Just oh that's too bad, I
10:31
thought it was a real chimp. It had like a bunch of radio
10:35
controlled stuff inside. So the head's bigger than it
10:37
should be. It's not a terrible effect, but
10:40
when you're next to like fairly petite female characters,
10:43
there's a lot of women in this movie.
10:45
It it looked a little big to me. It looked a little larger than
10:48
it, like I had a big noggin, you know what I mean?
10:49
So it kind of took me out of it. I just kind of watched it from
10:52
that perspective about just so you know about those.
10:54
I was going to mention this about the the deaf father thing
10:58
that does come back because he's the one that comes home and
11:01
because he can't hear, he can't hear what's going.
11:03
He can see things, but he can't hear the ape coming at him.
11:06
He can't hear the girls screaming at him and all that
11:09
stuff. So that's the plot device.
11:11
That was it the whole time. He's deaf, man, so that at the
11:14
end he can come back and not really understand exactly what's
11:17
going on right away. Except he looks like his house
11:20
has been trashed and if that's the he.
11:22
Doesn't think. He walks in, Yeah.
11:24
He's like, oh, he's parting. There's a smashed flat screen on
11:26
the wall. This is a table.
11:27
Jar on the ground, yeah. There's a part of a jaw.
11:30
Oh, it's just the girls being girls, you know?
11:32
And they pick up these guys on the plane at the beginning of
11:34
the movie. They show up, of course, and
11:36
they can. And they're the dumbest.
11:37
They're they're the classic dumb guys, just the stupidest guys.
11:42
Very dumb. Yeah, but yeah, no, it had no
11:44
humor in it. It was pretty, pretty.
11:46
Played pretty straight. Couple of like goofy with the
11:48
goof goofball guys. They were supposed to be kind of
11:51
comedy relief, but they weren't that funny.
11:52
No, they weren't. Yeah, no they weren't.
11:55
But there was 1 scene that was very much a kind of homage.
11:58
At least that's how I felt to Cujo.
12:00
There's a scene where the girl like tries to seek refuge inside
12:03
of a car and that doesn't go very well because the chimp has
12:07
the fob, the key fob and is able to unlock the doors.
12:11
And not only that, but also pop open the the trunk and have his
12:15
way with her. And he does.
12:16
And some of these deaths, I got to tell you, they are they
12:18
didn't, if they did cut anything out of this movie, they didn't
12:21
cut anything out of the deaths. It's gruesome.
12:23
There's some gruesome is it? Did you throw up?
12:25
Barry in my. Area he was looking, he was
12:27
looking my way a couple of times while I was for sure just
12:29
watching. Yeah, yeah.
12:31
So beware of that. It was also very dark, so it was
12:34
kind of hard to see a lot of what was going on a lot of the
12:37
time. So because it all takes place at
12:38
night, so the the effects were good, but they were hard to see
12:41
in a lot of cases. That's pretty modern stuff
12:43
really. That's the way it is these days.
12:44
Let's do a slight pivot. I'm going to tell you what
12:47
happened to me and then we're going to come back and I want
12:49
your star rating and I want your.
12:51
Final summer, You better ever been attacked by a chimp.
12:53
No, this has nothing to do with it and I'm curious if this has
12:56
ever happened to you. It happened while I was making
12:57
dinner. I'm very excited about this.
12:59
I don't think it's ever happened in my life.
13:01
I opened a new bottle of ketchup and a new bottle of mustard at
13:04
the same time. Like I have never run out of 1
13:08
and I guess the other and then had to open 2 new bottles at the
13:10
same time. They don't work in that kind of
13:13
exact science to me. Does this ever happened to you?
13:17
Stuck with me. No, I mean, I'm not a mustard,
13:19
I'm a ketchup guy, but I'm not a mustard guy.
13:21
So me too. It never happened to me by
13:22
default. OK, it takes me a long time to
13:25
get through mustard, so I. Yeah, no, it's a that's one line
13:29
versus like a glob of ketchup, right.
13:31
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Mustard is is is minimal.
13:34
I actually just, that's weird because I just watched a YouTube
13:36
video a couple days ago about a guy that was trying some some
13:40
mustard. It was like hot, like classic
13:42
hot mustard. I don't know the name of the
13:44
mustard, I forget, but he tried a regular version of it that was
13:46
like quite hot. But then he tried like a mixed
13:49
powdered version of the same stuff that some YouTube fan of
13:52
his was like, you got to try the powdered version, man.
13:55
So he did and he cooked up some brats and then put the stuff on
13:59
it and almost had a like his head almost imploded while he
14:02
ate the mustard. It was that hot.
14:04
Yeah, wow. Powdered mustard.
14:06
That's all right. Well, he, he, he put water in it
14:09
and liquefied it and turn it into yeah.
14:11
That's what I'm saying, yeah. Yeah, OK, enough of that stuff.
14:13
Anyway, I just had to say it was very exciting for me.
14:16
We're coming back in. I need to know.
14:18
How you take pleasure in the simple things, Jim.
14:20
It really was. I'm excited.
14:22
All right, let's go to final thoughts and star rating.
14:27
Rob, what are you taking out of this movie?
14:29
Why don't you kick us off? With your final thoughts, what
14:30
am I taking out of it? OK, well I'm taking I'm not
14:33
taking much out of it. I'm I'm basically to me it was a
14:36
very average flick. It was a 2.5 out of five.
14:39
It was an average right down the middle thing.
14:41
Now I I can understand why other people might find it a little
14:44
interesting if they've never seen Cujo.
14:46
It does follow a pretty the pretty basic tropes of horror
14:49
movies. Hard to make horror out of a
14:51
chimp though, in my opinion. Not really horrific, it's just
14:55
shitty. It's just a crappy situation,
14:57
But I don't know. Ultimately it was AI would say
15:00
it's a fairly safe horror movie with a little guy in or or and
15:04
or girl in a gal in a in a chimp costume running around for an
15:07
hour and a half. There must have been some CG
15:09
overlay because some of the close up of the face didn't look
15:13
like a mask at all. No, it looked like they were.
15:15
It was motorized stuff like old Rick Gilker style.
15:18
Yeah, Yeah. But you.
15:19
Have a better eye for this kind of stuff than I do.
15:21
For me, I I wasn't distracted by the chimp.
15:23
In fact, didn't even think it was a little guy in the costume
15:25
myself, but that's me. So what were you distracted by,
15:28
Wayne? What's your final thoughts?
15:29
And. Just I was distracted by the
15:32
gruesome deaths that were on display.
15:35
Faces getting torn off and fingers being forced into mouths
15:39
and eyes and pushed and squeezed and bowling ball kind of stuff,
15:43
you know? Classic, classic chimp stuff.
15:45
Really. You know, Yeah.
15:46
And I, and I don't know, I think the idea, I mean, chimps are far
15:49
stronger than human beings. And for one of those to go crazy
15:53
is probably a little more terrifying than a St.
15:55
Saint Bernard. You could probably overpower St.
15:57
Bernard even if it was infected with rabies.
15:59
But a chimp, those things have, you know, they're way stronger
16:03
than a human. And if they want to rip your
16:04
face off and they do you, you'd be hard pressed to to get past
16:10
that. So I do think you could probably
16:12
kick it in the head or something though, and that never happened
16:14
in this movie really. No, and and even a shovel, a
16:17
couple of shovels to the hand. The shovel got the worst of it.
16:20
The chimp was fine. So I don't know how that works,
16:23
but anyway, but I but that's interesting, Rob, that you that
16:25
you suspect that there was a meteor, a narrative that was
16:30
kind of maybe shaved down because maybe the studio was
16:32
like, no one wants 2 hours of this.
16:34
They want maybe an hour 30. Yeah, that seems to be where
16:37
that seems to be where movies are going these days with this
16:39
is kind of movie seems to be coming in about an hour and a
16:42
half, which I think is good. It was good.
16:44
Too. Yeah, and it was enough to kick
16:46
it off, as you said, with some writing on the screen.
16:48
Whenever they do that, you know they've cut out something
16:49
important. Something's happened, They've
16:51
got to summarize something for you.
16:54
So what's your star rating and and then take us out.
16:56
Yeah, I mean, I, I thought it was OK.
16:58
Like Rob said, it's this is not new territory.
17:01
We've seen it before, but it was a entertaining.
17:04
I found myself entertained the whole time.
17:06
I would say it's a three out of five.
17:07
I mean, I I wouldn't rush to the theater to see it, but I'd see
17:10
it. We're we're less we're less yin
17:12
and Yang on this than than we typically are.
17:14
I would say it's a 2.5 to 3 at the best.
17:17
Yeah. So it was not a waste of time.
17:19
It was, but it was also we didn't come out of there
17:22
different people. Like it was like, yeah, we we've
17:24
seen this before the. Only thing we saw Magnolia.
17:27
Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
17:28
All right, well, Rob, thank you once again for being here.
17:31
Always good to have you to give us the rundown on the movies you
17:34
don't want to miss or maybe you do, but you see them so that you
17:38
can bring us the best news. Barry, always a pleasure to see
17:41
you as always. And to our listeners and our
17:43
viewers, Primate check it out at the local theater rented as a on
17:47
demand or wait till it comes to streaming.
17:50
But make sure you kind of mostly see it because it's a nice
17:52
average movie. Let's have a great.
17:54
Night. See ya.
17:55
Cheers. Thank you for listening to Two
17:59
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18:01
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