Rejected By Rod(?) Part Thirteen - Primal Rage

Not everything I've written for FLICK ATTACK has made it to the show. Mr. Lott insists that these rapidly aging reviews will be posted eventually, but until then I'm just going to assume that they have been:

Rejected By Rod(?)

Primal Rage

(1988) 

Primal Rage is a rare example of a horror movie that manages to create some degree of tension due entirely to a pre-production fuck up. When the filmmakers decided not to cast the highly appealing Sarah Buxton as their female lead, but instead as her doomed roommate, they made it impossible for viewers not to agonize over the likelihood of her eventual fate—if only because she’s the only remotely sympathetic person in the entire picture. That her painful descent into madness and violent death is suggested to be an indirect punishment for a previous abortion only makes the film that much more infuriating.

An Italian production shot in the States, Rage is about what happens when university professor Bo Svenson (sporting the most pathetic ponytail in the entire history of mad science) experiments on a monkey, which then goes on to bite a muck-racking student journalist who contracts a contagious disease that turns all of its victims (all five of them) into zombie-like homicidal maniacs. 

Written by the auteur responsible for the infamous Cannibal Ferrox and directed by the son of FX artist Carlos Rambaldi (E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial), Primal Rage —with the exception of one decapitation near the end—is virtually gore-free and filled with cheap looking effects. Yet despite its being ineffective even as unintentional camp, horror completists might want to watch it as a double feature with Deborah Brock’s Slumber Party Massacre II make their way through star Patrick Lowe’s entire filmography in just one sitting.