Welcome to this animalistic new review at B-Movie Enema!

This week, we’re looking at one of those classic Italian movies that wants to be an American horror film, 1988’s Primal Rage. Those are fun, aren’t they? This one comes from a couple of names of pretty decent note. First, you have director Vittorio Rambaldi. He’s a bit of a nepo baby. His father, Carlo, was a two-time Academy Award-winning visual effects maestro. He won for 1979’s Alien and 1982’s E.T. the Extra-Terrestial. Carlo Rambaldi had a third nomination for 1976’s King Kong. By the way, that’s my very favorite King Kong too. Look at Jessica Lange, in her big screen debut, and tell me it’s not the most beautiful of all the versions of that tale.

While Carlo would go on to do the effects for the awful King Kong Lives, he would end his career on this film for his son. Interestingly, though, I can only think of one thing Carlo would create for this movie, but we’ll get there when we get there. The last name Rambaldi would not be the only major Italian name associated with this movie, though.

The writer of Primal Rage is billed as Harry Kirkpatrick. Harry Kirkpatrick is not a real person. It’s actually a combination of two men. The first is James Justice. He only wrote three films. This was his first. The second was Nightmare Beach, which was also credited as Harry Kirkpatrick as both writer and director. That other person is Umberto Lenzi. Lenzi had a hell of a career, particularly in the 70s.

Lenzi started out in the 60s, mostly doing adventure films and a few ripoffs of other popular movies like the Bond films. By the end of the decade, he was making Spaghetti Westerns. When the 70s came along, Lenzi would make four films with American actress Carroll Baker that would basically solidify him as one of the great Italian giallo filmmakers. Those films would be Orgasmo, So Sweet… So Perverse, A Quiet Place to Kill, and Spasmo.

As Lenzi was in the midst of making those films, he also made poliziottesco films, the Italian crime drama genre. One of the very best of those is 1974’s Almost Human. What’s more, Lenzi would make the first film of another Italian staple by the end of the decade and the dawn of the 80s. In 1972, Lenzi made Man from the Deep River, the first Italian cannibal film. As the 70s came along, he’d revisit the genre with 1980’s Eaten Alive! and 1981’s Cannibal Ferox. The latter was released on the heels of the greatest and best-known of the cannibal films, Cannibal Holocaust. In addition to Eaten Alive!, Lenzi also released another well-known film in his filmography, the zombie-esque sci-fi horror film, Nightmare City, in which he truly tells us “The Nightmare Becomes Reality.”

But for Primal Rage, Lenzi and Justice not only give us another sci-fi horror film, but they also give us a monkey run amok. Monkeys running amok was a very 80s thing. There were movies like George Romero’s Monkey Shines from the same year as this film, 1988, 1986’s Link, 1985’s In the Shadow of Kilimanjaro, and 1987’s Project X. 1990 would bring us another killer ape movie, Shakma. That’s one that will have its day on this blog someday. We do have a fascination with our close evolutionary cousins, and I’m always up for a good ape movie, but Primal Rage is not really an ape run amok movie. We’ll be finding out shortly that it has a little closer association with the zombie/rage virus subgenre.

Before we do that, if you’re a person who was a teenager playing video games in the early 90s, you have to recognize the title of Primal Rage. Yeah, there was an arcade game with the same name. That featured an ape and a dinosaur beating the ever-lovin’ shit out of each other. I wish that were a game based on this movie. I’d watch 91 minutes of an ape and a dinosaur beating the ever-lovin’ shit out of each other.

While I could totally look up 91 minutes worth of YouTube footage of people playing Primal Rage, I guess I’ll watch this movie instead, which does not have the same plot.

You gotta love a killer rage disease spread by an infected monkey movie that opens with a loud, happy pop song. So the credits mostly follow college-aged photographer, Sam Nash, as he bops around campus taking pictures of stuff here, there, and everywhere. He then uses his camera to save a damsel in distress as her car is about to be towed for being illegally parked. Basically, he tells the tow truck operator that it’s illegal to tow a car that isn’t ticketed to be towed. I guess that might be true. I never really thought of it, but it makes the girl’s naughty bits vibrate pleasantly, so I guess, if nothing else, he’s done something to flash a big toothy grin about.

The damsel in distress is Lauren, and we’ll be seeing more of her later. Interestingly, the actress playing Lauren, Cheryl Arutt, had an acting career of over 20 years. She then transitioned into psychology. She now works as a clinical and forensic psychologist and has appeared several times on various news channels to give expert opinion. She also does TED talks. She had two more credits after this movie before retiring from acting.

Aaaand while we’re at the meeting some key players stage of this movie, we should mention Frank Duffy because he’s gonna be pretty important here soon. Frank Duffy is introduced as a reporter for the college paper. He’s got a little bit of that smarmy look to him. Think of him somewhere between John Lennon and Steven Spielberg in looks. He’s in a tiny bit of hot water as of late because he wrote a story about a group of girls who are used to help lure blue-chip sports recruits to the school.

Duffy is interested in finding out more about a “monkey abuser” on campus. Sam says he can’t just break into this guy’s office. Duffy finds Sam’s lack of risk-taking to be kind of pathetic. He even says that Geraldo would be “up this guy’s ass with a flashlight” to get this story.

What is this about a monkey abuser? Well, Bo Svenson plays Ethridge. He’s doing experiments on a baboon. His experiments have to do with revitalizing brain cells. Understand this is going on during a time in which college students were quite concerned about animal testing and experimentation. So, Duffy thinks he can make a pretty big splash by uncovering this story happening right here on the campus.

That’s not Ethridge’s only issue. Honestly, I’m kind of sympathetic with his studies. Ethridge is on thin ice with the pharmaceutical company that is funding his research. Ethridge seems to be legitimately concerned about solving brain diseases and injuries like brain damage, memory loss, and even Alzheimer’s Disease. But it is a slow process. While his benefactor is there looking in on the progress of his work, the baboon ends up having an episode that shows the drugs they’re pumping into it are not exactly working as well as the benefactor had hoped. On one side, he’s threatening to yank the funding from Ethridge. On the other hand, an idealistic, and maybe somewhat scummy, journalism student wants to expose what he’s doing at the school.

Sam does attempt to request an interview with Ethridge, but the doctor simply drives away. While Sam is also likely wanting to expose any unethical testing done on animals, at least he isn’t willing to do crimes to get a story. He actually seems to want to interview the doctor and expose anything that seems fishy from there. Duffy just wants to break in and take the story.

When Lauren returns to her dorm, she discovers someone she doesn’t know going through stuff in her room. This is Debbie, her new roommate. Debbie is kindly enough. She’s late to the new semester because she was pregnant and then had an abortion. Debbie is almost instantaneously sympathetic. She was going through Lauren’s closet because she “had never seen clothes this nice before.”

Now, knowing this is written and directed by Italians, you better believe Debbie’s in for a rough time in this movie.

At the bar, Duffy says he and Sam should wait until about 1 a.m. and go over to Ethridge’s lab and break in and get all the goods on him and what he’s doing. Again, Sam refuses to break the law. Duffy doesn’t seem to care at all about the small shit like laws and order and ethics. He borrows Sam’s camera and opts to do the breaking in business anyway. After the security guard makes his final rounds, Duffy approaches the door to the lab and picks the lock with not much more than a straightened paper clip. He sneaks around and takes pictures of the chair that is used to tie the baboon down. He then sees the baboon in its cage. When he takes a picture, the flash causes the baboon to go nuts.

So, Duffy does exactly what any asshole would do when he has a camera and a pissed off baboon; he keeps taking pictures. The repeated flashing of the camera causes the baboon to eventually rattle its cage so much that it breaks open the door. He then bites Duffy and flees into the night. Busting through the window causes the alarm to go off, which brings the cops right away. Seriously, it’s like the cops were waiting in the parking lot for the alarm to go off they arrive so quickly.

Well, the rage monkey doesn’t last much longer because it launches itself right into the windshield of the cop car and busts his fuckin’ mug on the window and dies instantly.

Ethridge and his assistant don’t know why the animal broke free, so they aren’t exactly worried about the effects of the animal breaking free. They are more concerned about how their work was going to be set back by weeks when they only have 60 days to get their benefactor better results.

The next day, Debbie reveals herself to be a super genius. She actually reveals she has an IQ of 187, surprising Lauren but endearing her to the more serious of the two roommates. We also meet a trio of… how do I put this… date rapists. These jabronis go around and do street interviews with girls which usually include asking them about their majors, their phone numbers, their favorite sex position, whether they wear panties or not, and general date rapist type shit. When they approach Lauren and Debbie, Sam bests the guy asking them questions and basically saves them from the lecherous and embarrassing behavior. He explains to the girls that despite the ivory walls at the prestigious college, the place is full of animals.

Later, Sam stops by Duffy’s place. He’s been missing all day. The editor wants his story. He finds a disheveled Duffy who claims he was not at the lab despite the baboon having escaped the night before. But, hey, even with Duffy’s general state of hygiene and how painful his bite wound is, at least he’s got something to look forward to and get cleaned up for that night. Sam says he’s set Duffy up with Debbie, so he better change his underwear and get cleaned up. Back at the lab, Ethridge looks at the security cam footage to see Duffy messing around in the lab.

On the double date that night, things are going well. Sam and Lauren look like they will start slobbering all over each other’s faces any minute. Debbie and Duffy like talking to each other, and she’s rather pleasing to the eyes, so that makes Duffy’s nether bits tingle. In the bathroom, a sting from the bite wound gives some indication to Sam that maybe something is wrong with Duffy. But then, as they leave the bathroom, they find one of the date rapist jerkoffs aggressively asking to fuck Lauren and/or bury his face in Debbie’s tits.

Duffy reacts poorly to this and nearly breaks the jerkoff’s hand to get him to get the fuck out of there, indicating that he’s maybe got some new found vigor that is showing as high aggression.

What I kind of love about this movie is how much it leans on telling you exactly what to feel about various characters. It’s, in some ways, clumsy, but also kind of in that charming 80s sort of way. The date rapist jerkoffs are really detestable. They even have chiseled jawlines that are extremely punchable. Meanwhile, we already have a ton of appreciation for Debbie, maybe more than even Lauren, who, ostensibly, is the female lead of this movie by virtue of being the main character’s love interest. Debbie got pregnant, had an abortion, apparently grew up poor, was late getting to college, but also has a genius-level intellect.

What’s more, on her date with Duffy, she reveals that both of her parents were criminals. Her dad was caught committing real estate fraud and was then shot and killed. Her mother is in jail for writing bad checks. She even tells Duffy that she never had a guy stand up for her like Duffy did at the bar to get rid of the jerkoffs. So, that’s really piling it on the “we need to like and/or feel sorry for Debbie” sentiment. This movie is going to end horribly for her.

The next day, Duffy decides to go to the hospital to get his wound checked out. It’s starting to throb and ooze blood. As he waits to be seen, he suddenly starts flipping out asking what’s going on with all this fucking waiting. He trashes the place and beats up a few guys before running away. Look, I’m not going to say the rage monkey’s infected him. I will say this guy is a real hero. He’s out there saying all the things we can’t about these goddamn wait times at appointments, goddammit!

So, while it seems as though Duffy popped a blood vessel all over the outside of his head and face and stuff, he is currently missing, at least as far as the campus police are concerned. Oh, and things are already starting to turn pretty shitty for our poor Debbie. When Duffy was getting a little too rough with the kissing her business on their date, he drew blood on her neck. Duffy was sweaty and already starting to feel the effects of that rage stuff the baboon had.

So you can probably guess what that means for Debbie…

Yup, she’s getting sweaty and not feeling too good either. It’s not even close to being done for this poor girl either, but we’ll get to that in a moment. Sam, trying to figure out what is going on with his buddy Duffy, finds the pictures he took and discovers what he saw in Ethridge’s lab. Meanwhile, speaking of Duffy, he’s still going around having a hissy fit about everything. He’s acting like an animal, maybe, more accurately, a baboon, but he’s also looking kind of like a zombie. He yanks a traffic sign out of the ground and uses it to smash a cop car. He then later kills a cop and takes his gun.

While Sam confronts Ethridge about what was on the film in his camera, our cartoonish, Stephen King-level jabroni date rapists are looking for revenge for how Duffy showed one of them up at the bar. So they just happen to find the sick Debbie. They do speak the date rapist creed of “she’ll do” and drag her to their car where they force her to drink beer before dragging her into their dorm to gang rape her.

As awful as this is because these guys truly suck shit through a straw shoved up a dog’s ass, Debbie does give a little bit of a fight back. This includes kicking them, scratching them, and taking chunks out of them with her teeth. That’s awesome! But, on the other hand, the worst of the worst people on campus are now infected with a rage virus. That’s not so awesome.

As she escapes their dorm, I like how we see a date coming to a conclusion. A date that was seeded earlier in the movie. One of Debbie and Lauren’s professors noticed a particular student who was trying to get his attention to get a decent grade. This is the stuff that gives a little bit of levity to a movie that is about a rage virus that turns people into murderers. After he believes he scared off whatever they heard outside the car parked in the woods so they can fuck around to give the girl a better grade for his class… oh and the professor thinks him shouting he knows Kung Fu is enough to get whatever is lurking around their car to leave them alone. That’s great. Anyway, what was I saying? Oh yeah, it turns out it was Duffy who snuck into the backseat of the car, killed the girl, and then kills the professor with his bare hands.

Just to remind us that this is, more or less, an Italian flick, we need to realize not everything is going to make a whole lotta sense. Enter a couple of cops who get word about Duffy’s freak-out at the hospital. They show up at Sam’s dorm with a warrant to search HIS place looking for evidence that Duffy was on crank. They hassle Sam pretty good too. Again, remember… This is some Italian shit so of course the cops are bad and stupid and do things that would not be at all how normal cops would act. I would understand if they want to talk to Sam because they are friends and co-workers at the school paper, but they don’t even search his place for Duffy’s smack.

Anyway, it’s also a reminder that maybe a script co-written by an Italian horror guy about a rage virus from a monkey that turns people into rage zombies isn’t exactly full enough to pull the movie over the 90-minute finish line.

Now, I should also back up a bit for something that does make good sense in this movie. Earlier, Sam confronted Dr. Ethridge about the baboon from the pictures. He made something of a leap, however correct it is (even if it is impossible based on what he could possibly know about what happened to Duffy), that Ethridge knows how the baboon and Duffy’s sudden aggression are connected. When Sam intended to call the police to get Ethridge to explain himself and be held accountable for whatever Sam thinks he should be, Ethridge is like, “Yeah, that’s cool if you want to call the cops and lock me away, but if you do… Duffy’s mega fucked.”

That’s actually kind of smart. Ethridge did have something that should help Duffy, or at least hopefully will help him. Of course he should. He knows what is in the stuff that baboon got injected with, and if the baboon passed that to Duffy, then he should have an idea of how to solve the problem. I approve.

Duffy seems to be a bit too far gone for whatever Ethridge can do to help him. The good news, for now, is that it seems as though Debbie has yet to go full rage zombie. She just sweats, has some aggression, and feels sick. She even returned home and asked Lauren to put her to bed. Duffy and Sam reunite at Duffy’s place. At first, Duffy attacks Sam, only for him to get a moment of lucidity. He gives Sam the gun to kill him, but he hesitates. Duffy then lunges again to attack, so Sam shoots him dead. Sam tells Ethridge that Duffy’s dead and it’s all over.

Ethridge says he must do an autopsy.

While Sam cleans out Duffy’s things at the student paper, Lauren arrives to say that she 1) hasn’t told Debbie about Duffy dying (which I think Sam says he died in a fire from smoking in bed?) and 2) she’s not acting well and has a bite from Duffy on her neck. At her dorm, they see that Debbie’s messed up the place. Believing she’s not there, Sam is about to try to explain what happened to Duffy and why it’s important they find Debbie, but uh oh, Spaghettios, Debbie comes out of, I dunno, the closet and attacks.

It appears that while Lauren was going to give her condolences to Sam, Debbie turned into a rage monster zombie. Luckily, Lauren knocks Debbie out while she was trying to attack Sam. They were able to subdue her long enough for Dr. Ethridge to get there and transport her to his lab to try to fix her. At the lab, the doc gets to work on her while Sam and Lauren just have to wait to see if she can be saved.

Lauren asks if she’s infected. After all, she’s not 100% sure if she sees a future with Sam after this whole rage monster thing. She wants to know if she can get it on with some other dude down the line without creating more rage monster zombies. It’s here that Sam says that he was the one who killed Duffy. Now Lauren is really not so sure there’s a future with this guy after this whole rage monster thing.

So, remember how I’ve been teasing that this movie will not end well for Debbie? Well, here we are. Ethrdige took blood samples and realized that she’s no longer producing T cells (aka lymphocytes), which are required for you to fight diseases and stuff. So, yeah, she’s screwed. He tells her that it’s too late to save her, but he could use her for science. I like that he’s trying to convince her of this while she is just grunting and breathing heavily and bleeding from, well, everywhere. I think all he’s saying about how many people will be so thankful to her is kind of falling on deaf, rage-filled ears.

Debbie gets the last laugh though… He’s about to make some pretty heavy life choices for her. Namely, whether she will actually be alive or not. She turns the tables and overpowers Ethridge, killing him instead.

Debbie is out on her own after killing Ethridge. The three jabronis who love to drink and yell and rape are all about to head to a big Halloween shindig, and starting to really show signs of rage virus. As much as I hate this trio of douchebags, I love that a guy dressed in a generic, cheap-ass devil costume asks the jabronis if they got their costumes, the decidedly better skeleton costumes, at Goodwill. They beat the shit out of the guy’s car, ripping off the driver’s side door. At least the movie knows how to turn these cartoon douches into even more cartoonish monsters with a sense of humor.

So we’ve got the jabronis destroying cars, what’s Debbie doing to rage out? Well, a guy dressed as an adult baby, who is either going to the Halloween party or his dominatrix, walks by her, and she grabs his hair and rips his scalp off his head. She then encounters a cop and tears his balls off. The trio of frat rage monsters find a guy dressed as Dracula and tear his throat out. You can’t say the rage monsters don’t know how to have a good time.

Eh…

Anyway, the trio of monsters is at the party while Sam and Lauren are looking for Debbie. The frat monsters are just finding people (or, I suppose, costumes) that piss them off and they kill the poor bastard. Case in point, the guy who has multiple faces and faucets as a mask.

I love how the blood comes out of the faucets. That’s ingenious.

The primary rapist rage monster spotted Lauren forcing her to flee from the party with him in pursuit. When Lauren gets cornered, Debbie comes busting in to give just enough time for Lauren to run away, but he kills Debbie. Another of the frat monsters finds and corners Sam, but Sam grabs a pipe and shoves it through the guy’s mouth and out the back of his head to kill him. The third guy chases Sam into the gym, where Sam uses the folding bleachers to trap the monster and crush him. It’s a pretty good kill using something you don’t normally see used in these horror movies.

The third, and final, shit sucker chases Lauren into the prop room of the drama department. As he finds her hiding behind the wardrobe, she uses a club to smash him in the head before running off toward another portion of the building. When he finally catches up to her, Lauren’s screams alert Sam to where they are. He grabs an axe and cuts the frat fuck’s head off. Lauren breaks down crying in Sam’s arms as he begins to realize she is never going to recover from this adventure, so he might want to go ahead and see himself out of this relationship now.

The cops show up the next morning and ask this guy if he ever, for even a split second, felt that the goings on the night before were possibly a trap…

Just when you think things are all over, we get an establishing shot of a spigot watering the courtyard of the dorms where Lauren and Debbie lived. Lauren packs up and is moving out with the help of Sam, only for her to be attacked by a raged out Dr. Ethridge. Sam tosses Ethridge over the railing onto the spigot where it starts shooting the water out of his mouth.

Primal Rage is fun. There are things about it you could nitpick. You could talk about how oddly paced it is in terms of timing within the world of the film itself. Like the monkey infected Duffy, and it seems like everything goes down in the course of two days. But it could also be, like, two weeks too. Debbie is horrifically treated as a character. The only terrible thing we see in the film is her being attacked by the shit-sucking frat fucks, but she fought them off herself. That’s pretty good. Still, she had a bad home life, an unfortunate situation that led to her needing an abortion, and then she turns into a rage monster that ultimately gets killed by the worst of the worst frat fucks.

Just to add salt to the wound, when you see her dead body, it’s ripped open at the chest, and they made sure to show her breasts.

Still, the movie is competent and has enough entertaining things to even chuckle at (in a good way) for you to stay with it and want to see where it goes. I also like that the movie could have very easily turned this into a 28 Days Later style rage monster pandemic, but it doesn’t. It decides to stay a little smaller scale and just have a total of six rage zombies. You wouldn’t have necessarily expected that to be the case with Italians at the head of this movie’s production. Give this flick a try. You should be able to find it on several streaming platforms, but I would make sure to not watch the one on Tubi because, for some reason, they put the widescreen movie into a square format, making everything look wrong. With Vinegar Syndrome recently doing a remaster of the movie, you should be able to find it in HD and in its true widescreen format.

We turn the page to August now. We’re now rushing headlong toward the blog’s momentous 500th review. Before we get there in September, we gotta keep things going. Next week, I am going to be looking at a franchise that is looooong overdue for coverage here. I’m a big fan of Godzilla. Big G has never been featured here before, so let’s change that. I’m not starting with the original, but I thought it might make better sense to start with one you can have a little fun with. Next time, we’re going to be fighting off the Invasion of Astro-Monster.

Or Godzilla vs. Monster Zero, if you’re nasty.