Primate (in theaters)

Some movies are here to kill off characters, and they don’t pretend to be anything else. 

That’s the case with “Primate,” where a family’s pet chimpanzee with rabies turns into that special kind of movie where you’re really into pre-meditated murder. The movie doesn’t really bother with plot or characterization beyond that point, except to explain things just enough to get a bunch of people together in a pool. From that point on the movie only cares about murder, brutal and gory and as calculated as a monkey is capable of. If you’re into watching those kind of murders, or seeing disposable characters failing to outwit murder monkey, then you’ll find the movie deeply satisfying. If you’re looking for anything beyond that, you won’t be. 

It does get very serious about the killing. Director Johannes Roberts has said he was strongly influenced by “Cujo,” but compared to him Stephen King looks sentimental. The first murder happens before the title drop, with the chimpanzee suddenly ripping the face off a hapless vet, but mostly Roberts let himself wallow in each death. The characters are safe in the pool – murder chimp can’t swim – but the minute they try to get out for any reason they’re in trouble. He’ll stalk them, trap them, and delight in menacing them with his voice board when they’re out of his reach. When he does catch them, he rips them apart with incredible violence. 

Cast members Johnny Sequoyah and Troy Kotsur are both capable of more, but the movie isn’t interested in giving them the chance. It just wants carnage, and it’s offering it up in big bucketfuls to anyone who’s interested. 

Grade: Two stars

The Housemaid (in theaters)

“The Housemaid” isn’t the movie it seems to be, and that ends up being the best thing about it.

For the whole first stretch of the movie, “The Housemaid” seems like one of those thrillers where the evil wife tries to get in the way of the protagonist’s connection to a hot older married man. It’s not a terrible take on the genre, and Amanda Seyfried is fantastic as the evil wife, but this portion of the movie ends up getting boring after a while. 

But director Paul Feig, who also directed 2018’s “A Simple Favor,” isn’t about to leave it at that. Not only does he utilize the big twist from the novel the movie is based on, he takes it to another level. Everything that’s come before coalesces into an ending that’s both high camp and high drama, and all the more entertaining for it. Seyfried adds new layers to her performance that recontextualizes everything else we know about her character. Even Sydney Sweeney’s performance is finally shown off to its best advantage. 

Does it make a lot of sense? Not really. But everything in this movie exists only in the heightened reality of melodrama, where whether something is logical doesn’t really matter. The only important thing is that it’s entertaining, and the final act of this movie delivers that feeling in spades. 

You just have to make it through the less interesting stuff to get there. 

Grade: Two and a half stars

Jenniffer Wardell is an award-winning movie critic and member of the Denver Film Critics Society and the Utah Film Critics Association. Drop her a line at [email protected].