“I’m a rageaholic! I just can’t live without rageahol!” Ok, that’s The Simpsons, but speaking of indispensable entertainment – at least as far as readers of this site or listeners of the Really Awful Movies Podcast are concerned – Umberto Lenzi is one of the creative forces behind Primal Rage. As writer, Lenzi’s insane Italian sensibilities are blanketed all over this one, and in the best way possible.
We’re in Florida, home base for other bedlamite Italian co-productions like Nightmare Beach and The Last Shark, and on the campus of what looks like – or is at least meant to be – Florida International University.
Professor Etheridge is played by the towering figure of Swedish genre legend, Bo Svenson (complete with asinine miniature ponytail). He is doggedly testing a mysterious protein on baboons in a lab, meant to reverse the symptoms of Alzheimer’s. Speaking of which, who would possibly otherwise forget the insane creature feature Bo starred in, Snowbeast?
The professor has to contend with university bureaucracy which hilariously give the doc “two months” to generate lab results or they’ll pull his funding. That’s not how science – or research grants – work, bucko.
Throwing a monkey wrench, as it were, into the proceedings is Duffy, a dogged, self-styled new journalist a la Truman Capote, Gay Talese or Hunter Thompson, who slings ink for the campus paper and is suspicious of goings on inside the lab. And he decides to drunkenly flout the law, journalistic integrity, etc., by breaking in – all in the service of a scoop.
After ornery simians bite the Duffster, he begins sporting open sores and developing, well, primal rage. And things go apeshit/haywire thereafter. Which won’t be unfamiliar to fans of Hell of the Living Dead, Rabid, Uninvited, Man’s Best Friend, Shakma, and probably 500 others.
What makes Primal Rage so fun is the coked out 80s touchpoints vomited all over the screen – from teased hair and leotards to scooters, jocks, nerds and absurdly menacing frat guys. It’s all dialed up to 12, forget 11, and when things get going, things get weird and very fun indeed. One of the better good-bad horror movies of all time.
***1/2 (out of 5)
Really Awful Movies 