‘Primate’ is a one-note creature feature in the ‘Cocaine Bear’ mould – this time swapping the bear (and the coke) for a chimpanzee with rabies.

The set-up is simple and enjoyably lurid: an isolated clifftop house in Hawaii, a group of twenty-somethings marooned without their anthropologist father, the family chimp, Ben, who has lived with them for years and can even ‘talk’ via a vocaliser keyboard then flips into an animal-from-hell. From that point on, it’s basically survival-by-corridor: sprinting, barricading, searching for phones, and trying to outlast something that’s faster, stronger, and far more vicious than any of them.

There are obvious genre echoes – a bit of Jaws in the ‘trapped with the predator’ tension, though here the predator is literally inside the home rather than out in open water. The father is played by Troy Kotsur (the Oscar winner from ‘CODA’), which gives the film an intriguing casting anchor, but the surrounding characters are thinly sketched, and that’s the problem: when the people are this generic, the jeopardy becomes generic too.

The effects are a mix of practical work – animatronics, prosthetics, and a full-on monkey suit – and the film goes hard on the gore. Limbs get torn open, skulls get split. It’s a blood-soaked ride that often feels less like suspense than like a catalogue of grisly set-pieces. In tone it’s a throwback to those 80s ‘siege’ movies where, by the end, family bonds are tested and reforged in the fight against the interloper – except here the interloper is tragically someone who was part of the family, raised in the home by parents we’re told included an anthropologist father and a linguistics professor mother who died of cancer.

Underneath the splatter, it does circle one genuinely interesting idea: the same question you get with Regan in ‘The Exorcist’ – once something has ‘taken over’, is this still the being you loved, or just a body wearing its face? It’s a pity the film doesn’t push that theme further, because as it stands ‘Primate’ is mostly noise, nastiness, and mayhem – forgettable, even if it’s briefly ferocious.

And, I must confess, the Robbie Williams chimp film ‘Better Man’ still has the more unsettling monkey-on-screen energy.