Director Vittorio Rambaldi’s horror film is such a silly bafflingly bizarre horror movie that even after the credits rolled, I was kind of dumbfounded. “Primal Rage” feels so much like someone wrote a teen college drama comedy about an aspiring journalist, and his love interest. And then someone had the bright idea of taking a script for a horror movie and just awkwardly wedged it right in between all the twenty something romance and growing pains with mopey aspiring photographer Sam and even mopier student Lauren.
A scientist at a Florida university inadvertently creates a “rage virus” while performing experiments intended to restore dead brain tissue in baboons. When Duffy, a journalist for the college paper breaks into the campus lab, he’s bitten by one of the infected baboons; the virus soon spreads to a trio of rapists and valley girl Debbie, all of whom go on killing sprees on the eve of Halloween.
The first twenty minutes begin so unlike a horror movie, right down to a raucous, upbeat pop theme song that does nothing to set the tone. Typically in a horror movie of this ilk that devolves in to such grim circumstances we’d at least have a more downbeat heavy metal score. It’s almost like beginning “The Crazies” with “Walking on Sunshine” playing at full blast. “Primal Rage” has the seeds for a really good horror movie it’s just that the writers Umberto Lenzi and James Justice never seem to know what to do with them. It’s suggested that maybe this rage virus is punctuated by its victims’ deeper desires and insecurities, and then it leaves that theory dangling in the air.
Then the writers punish the most vulnerable character (the out of wedlock teen mom) the most. Then there’s never quite an indication of the viruses hold on the characters. Are they conscious through their rage fits or aren’t they? Are they pursuing these violent acts or not? And was the government ever made aware of this situation? How were Sam and Lauren able to just leave town in the end? In either case, the whole baboon escaping a lab and spreading the virus is prime for great gory suspense but the script goes off on tangents too many times. The script focuses almost too much on the human relationships to where the whole virus outbreak takes a back set for at least a quarter of the film’s run time.
In the climax the writers seem to run out of ideas and just hit us with a weird finale in a Halloween party set to the awkward theme song. “Primal Rage” definitely has definite highlights with some good kills, and a great concept. It just loses all of the potential in a storm of incoherent sub-plots, stiff acting, and probably the stupidest theme song of all time.