In short: Primal Rage (1988)

Original title: Rage – Furioa primitiva

An ever so slightly mad scientist (Bo Svenson) experiments on baboons in an attempt to revive dead brain tissue, working in college campus lab. Unfortunately, one of the college newspaper’s young journalists is bitten by one of those baboons while breaking into the lab to find evidence for illegal animal experiments. This being a horror film, the monkey’s bite causes what we’d call your typical rage zombie virus symptoms today, and soon, very bad skin problems and a murderous disposition make their way from our journalist, to his new girlfriend, to the rapist jock assholes who were pretty terrible even before they had an excuse.

Because the scientist is so crazy for experiments on the newly infected he’s not going to call for help, it will eventually fall to the college’s other intrepid reporter Sam (Patrick Lowe) and his new art student girlfriend Lauren (Cheryl Arutt) to save the day during the big campus Halloween party.

Primal Rage, directed by Vittorio Rambaldi, belongs to the group of Italian productions shot in the USA, made with an inexperienced (apart from Svenson) cast with not terribly exciting acting futures, using a mix of Italian and local US talent behind the camera.

As is typical for these films, there’s a certain disconnect between the authentically American cast and locations and the way they act, very much dragging the audience into a fantasy of how the US are (were) that’s even further away from the truth than the fantasies US movies have about their own country. It’s a very specific mood and tone some viewers will find off-putting because its obvious disconnect with reality, while others, like me, will find fascinating for exactly the same reasons.

Rambaldi is the son of the Carlo Rambaldi who was also involved in the special effects here together with Alex Rambaldi, another son of Carlo. Vittorio doesn’t appear to have made it very far in the film business, unfortunately, with four direction credits during the course of twenty years or so. He’s actually rather more capable than many an Italian no-name director, holding his own version of US culture together well enough, keeping the slow bits of the plot (co-written by Umberto Lenzi) moving quickly enough, and giving the violence a nasty edge that fits the simple yet icky design of what the infection does with its victims.

The climax with the rampaging frat boys is particularly effective, not just upping the body count but doing so in pleasantly unpleasant ways, while playing the violence very much as a more dramatic version of the underbelly of US college culture as we know it from movie, TV and courts of law.