DANGEROUSLY CLOSE TO HUMAN.

In an isolated Hawaii house, the Pinborough sisters (Johnny Sequoyah, Gia Hunter) and friends find themselves trapped when their pet chimp Ben goes crazy.

A movie that will do for chimpanzees what Jaws did for sharks. Ben may be a little too creepy right from the start, preventing us from building any kind of emotional attachment to him before everything goes wrong, but this is a tight little horror thriller in the spirit of Cujo (1983), where the teens try to come up with ways to reach phones or weapons without getting mauled by the intelligent, rabies-infected ape.

Nail-biting tension, with impressive practical effects.

2026-U.S. 89 min. Color. Widescreen. Directed by Johannes Roberts. Screenplay: Johannes Roberts, Ernest Riera. Cast: Johnny Sequoyah (Lucy Pinborough), Jessica Alexander (Hannah), Troy Kotsur (Adam Pinborough), Victoria Wyant, Gia Hunter, Benjamin Cheng. 

Last word: “We wanted to go practical, and that’s fine, cool, but the basis is that we need a guy to do that, and then it needs to be small enough, but also equally powerful enough. It needs to be small enough for the audience to go, ‘Oh, why have they got a 6-foot chimpanzee around the place, but powerful enough so that you feel genuinely terrified.’ Once we found Miguel, [performer Miguel Torres Umba] he was just a lunatic, (laughs) he went full chimp in the movie. Once we found him, we could just build around him, and it was beautiful. We had built multiple different puppet heads, different sequences, you know, I had a team of puppet and animatronic people doing the facial expressions and all sorts of stuff like that. Miguel would have different contact lenses for different stages of rabies.” (Roberts, Filmspeak)