I walked out of Prime8. I know. I can hardly believe it myself. I hate to walk out of movies. I never do it. In fact, I have a friend who loves to walk out of movies. They're like, "Nope, not entertaining. Not worth my time. I got other stuff to do." And she just walks out of the movie. I'm always in awe. I'm like, "You paid for it. You already committed a lot of time to watch what you had already. Don't you want to see how it ends? Maybe it gets better." So, here I was doing the exact same thing with just about 20 minutes of the movie left to go. But here's what happened.
I missed the press screening. So, it was the first showing of Thursday night and my dad ended up not having anything to do that evening. And so, rather than him just spending the evening by himself, I was like, "Hey, do you want to come with me to see Primeate? I have to go for work." And my dad always wants to support me and be supportive of what I'm doing. So, he's like, "Sure, I'd love to come along with you and see what it's like to see these movies for work." Uh, yeah, probably not my best idea. Uh, cuz he did not like it. And so, he kept nodding off, falling asleep. But every time he'd WAKE UP, SURE ENOUGH, IT WAS JUST when the chimpanzee was ripping off somebody's face or something like that. I think at one point, actually, I was like, "Don't look, Dad. He's going to kill this guy." And my dad was like, "No, I'm watching the movie." And I was like, I worry if I'm doing damage. Like imagine someone falling asleep and every time they come too, they see something horribly gory and violent on screen. I was like, I think some some countries might consider this torture.
So I was feeling pretty guilty about that. And then I wasn't even really watching the movie because it was so violent and disturbing and I was just I was looking down at my lap or closing my eyes or covering my eyes like 60% of the time. So, put that all together and finally I caught my dad when he was awake and I just leaned over and I said, "Do you want to just leave?" And he was like, "Yes." And I was like, "Let's go." So, as we left the theater, I could see in the dark as we rushed out the wide-eyed looks of the other movie goers looking at us. And so, they were either a, you know, uh, jealous that we had the guts to walk out of this horrible movie, or b they thought we were huge wimps. Again, it was very dark. It was hard to tell. I also think that I might have stepped on a mouse. I stepped on something lumpy and squishy again. It was dark. I don't know what was happening in that theater. It was weird. It was weird. It was a bizarre experience.
All right. So, what did I think of the I mean, I get I saw two-thirds of the movie. What I think of that. By the way, speaking of the movie going experience, theaters really do need to work on this. And I'm not even talking about stepping on maybe maybe stepping on a mouse. I'm going to choose to believe I didn't, but part of me thinks I did. All right, so anyway, A-list AMC A-list is amazing. So many of us love it, but 20 to 30 minutes of trailers and ads before a film is just nuts. I mean, A-list, it's pretty expensive, especially New York City. I mean, it's it's um dynamic pricing depending where you live. I think for New York City, it's close to 30 bucks already at this point, BUT I'D PAY A LITTLE BIT MORE. I mean, I get four movies a week. I'd pay a little bit more if they would cut that pre-show in half to like 10 to 15 minutes. How about you? I mean, I know some people just come late. Some people are like, I'm going to come 20 to 30 minutes late for the movie. But I really resent that because I don't like finding my seat in the dark. I like the whole experience. I'm not just there to see the movie or else I'd watch it at home. I like the experience of going to the movies. I like going to the concession stand. I like finding my seat. I like talking before the movie. So, and I like having a little a little bit of a pre-show. So, I'm really unhappy with the way the movie theater experience currently is. And speaking of going to the concession stand, they got to work on the food. I mean, it's unhealthy and it all has the same vibe. Like for us A-listers that go to the movies so often, like I go as many as two to three times a week because not only do I like movies, but it's my job and the food is just a real problem. Again, I could sneak stuff in, but it's so obvious. You know, everybody, you know, I would prefer not to have to do that. Like, come on, help me help you. Movie theater.
As for this movie, I could have handled the gore and violence. I mean, I've certainly seen other movies that are gory and violent. If there was more to the movie otherwise, right? If there was better story and acting. What a stinker. I would say the best thing about the film is the amazing location. Oh, I was like, is this a real house or did you build this for the movie? It's incredible. It's a cliffside, mostly glass house in Hawaii with a pool built into the cliffside. So, Prime8 is really a mix of real estate porn and torture porn because it turns out this chimpanzee is one sadistic sob.
The setup is that this chimp Ben gets rabies and they had an interesting little opening like some like a title card that came up that explains that rabies has been around for thousands of years and that a component of it is fear of water and I was oh that's interesting maybe this movie will be pretty good. It all went downhill from there. Especially, you know, one thing that really irked me. Well, a lot of things irked me, but one is that the script has it that they spend so much time in the pool because the chimp can't swim, not that it's suddenly afraid of water. So, I'm like, that seems like a huge missed opportunity.
Now, I have always believed I'm not a vet, that rabies symptoms in animals are that they become violent, aggressive, and disoriented. You know, that's one of the ways you can spot an animal who has rabies. Uh they don't they can't walk in a straight line. Their balance is off and also they're foaming at the mouth. And well, Ben had the foaming at the mouth. He seemed to be pretty his coordination and balance seemed to be excellent. Thank you very much. Uh but what was really weird is that he somehow became like a serial killer. Like he would toy with his victims in a sadistic way. Like if at some point he used his little keypad that allows him to speak to say it puts the lotion on the skin, I would not have been at all surprised. This movie was like Planet of the Apes meets Sons of the Lambs, but not anywhere near that interesting. Uh, and who wants to watch a chimp torture a bunch of stupid teenagers? And it's at one point I felt really bad for the teenagers. I I mean, I just felt so bad. I was like, what a horrible thing to happen to these uh teens. It's just it's weird. And then also I kept being taken out of the movie because I was like, "This chimp just has rabies. Why did it suddenly become evil? It should be more out of control, but instead it seems very in control. It shouldn't be able to do elaborate gotcha scenarios if it has rabies."
So a chimp with rabies, I can understand that as a pitch and it seems like a pretty simple, straightforward one. So the fact that this movie managed to somehow mess that up is like the most impressive thing about it. You're like, "It was right there." especially cuz there's some great source material to draw from.
Okay, so here are two that are the best ones, I think, and I bet some of you are already thinking of them. So, 2009, a woman in Connecticut had a pet chimp which had already been causing some problems. But one day, again, in 2009, it attacked her and particularly her friend with such ferocity that her friend suffered horrible injuries before the police had to shoot this chimp. and her friend needed a face transplant. One of the very first people ever to get a face transplant who would go on to appear on the Oprah Winfrey show. Um, so it was a really famous story. And then back in 1841, Edgar Ellen Poe wrote a famous short story called The Murders in the Room. I'm not going to spoil all of it for you because it's a good story. You should go read that instead of seeing primate. But it's basically a gruesome murder by an escaped orangutan. Oo, that's kind of a spoiler, but I need to tell you that to but the way the orangutang does the murder vi, you know, vintage classic Edgar Allan Poe. And I believe that Alan Moore kind of referenced this and the Jack the Ripper phenomenon um when we first meet uh Mr. Hyde in his League of Extraordinary Gentlemen. And those are great references. So yeah, these two things I kind of was familiar with them. Uh so I thought that Prime8 would maybe draw on these things and I can't believe I would think that they would know about these things for sure. And the fact that they don't draw on them to me is you know maybe they think that they are but wow. I mean what what what references to slip through your fingers.
Instead, they've just presented a teen slasher flick where a chimp is the killer with kills so sickening again, I couldn't stand to watch. Who made this? Well, what do you know? Somehow Walter Hermada has returned. So, yes, the Ellison's who now own Paramount have said that they think a good business strategy is to do deals with people who have been cancelled, right? They say, "Oh, they're going to work super hard. We don't believe in cancelling, etc., etc." But Hamada in fact had a deal with Paramount before the Ellison's acquired the studio. How did that happen? Well, Hermada got his start in horror. In fact, he built up Warner Brothers horror division and his reward was to go over to try and fix DC. Now, of course, that all went spectacularly wrong and he ended up moving to Paramount where he's gone back to horror and this is his first big movie at the studio. And his defense, I think this is a good idea. again, if you would reference these things that I just brought up. Um, but the execution here has gone spectacularly wrong.
So, Troy Kutzer is in this movie. He's a deaf actor who starred in Kota, the Oscar-winning movie. And when he showed up on screen, I was like, "Oh, wow. Hm. I wonder what they're going to do with this." Nothing. They did absolutely nothing with it. Uh, but I did think, you know, it made sense to have a deaf character who communicates with sign language just like his pet chimp does. Although I will say that it created some stretches in the film where there was no dialogue. It was all, um, sign language. And so, uh, that kind of the way it was handled kind of really hurt the momentum of the film. But I do think there is an idea here, just it never became anything, right? At least for the first two-thirds of the movie that I saw. Maybe it comes into play at the end of the movie, but I doubt it. So, Cutzer here is the father, and he's playing a famous writer with a potential movie deal who has to go off on a book signing, so that's why he's not home when the chimp goes nuts. Um, but why make him a famous writer with a potential movie deal? I think it seemed like it was just to explain why they had such a nice house, right? Like, it's not like he had the chimp in some kind of eccentricity or his research for a book he's writing. Like did he trade his family's lives for a bestseller that would become a movie? Like that would have been interesting. So the chimp actually isn't his. It was his late wife's who was a language expert. So I guess that's why she was drawn to her husband who was deaf and had this chimp. But that doesn't come into play either except for a couple photographs, right? Like a lot of people like this woman in Connecticut just have chimps as a pet. You don't need all this explanation if you're not going to do anything with it. It's just distracting, right? Like if his wife was a doctor, you would think that this family would be a lot more responsible on how they handle this chimp even after she's passed away. But that could have been a storyline too where they're like, "Ah, she's not here to watch us anymore and we've gotten sloppy with how we handle the chimp." I also at one point they were like, "There's no rabies in Hawaii." And I'm like, "I wonder if this movie is ever going to explain how they did get rabies in Hawaii." And I mean, again, I didn't watch the end of it, but I'd be surprised if it did. Uh, also I don't in his lack of urgency when he found that out uh was weird. He was like, I wonder why they won't pick up the phone. Weird. So, there's really nothing here. It's the movie is just an excuse to watch a chimp rip people's faces off in full gory detail right away. I mean, wow. As I said, the movie it's just torture porn. So, oh, by the way, the monkey looks super fake most of the time. Like I was like, I'm pretty sure that's a dude in a suit and they just put some goo on the mask. Like I mean I can understand that they couldn't afford a full CGI, but then why make this movie if you're not going to go all in? You're like we got to go all in, man. I mean look at the illustration for Murders in the room or look what this could have been. All right, so that's my review of Prime8 the movie that is now in theaters if that's your bag. All right, so share your thoughts down below. I'd love to hear your movie experiences. Subscribe today. And of course, as always, you can check out some more videos right now.