Dumpuary

            January is historically the worst month of the year for movies. The Big Picture lovingly calls it Dumpuary, because it is when studios dump out the movies they know are not going to be great. The main time for awards releases has just ended, so now it is time to put out the slop, and this lasts until about March, that is when the normal movies start to come back out. So far I have seen four movies from 2026, and they have topped out at three stars. The bottom end was 2 stars, which is not a common rating for me.

            Greenland 2, obviously a sequel, continues to follow the story of the family in the first film, and although this movie is significantly shorter than the original, it is still bad. There has been an apocalypse, and for the past five years, the family has been in shelter, but suddenly the shelter becomes unviable, so the family flees from Greenland to mainland Europe trying to reach a crater that has been rumored to be a utopia of new life and breathable air. They climb over trenches, go throw war zones, and stay in a hospital with Alzheimer’s patients.

            So when they land in England, they find what looks like a brand-new Audi SUV, even though the apocalypse has been going on for five years, and they start to drive. When they make it to the English Channel, it is completely dried up, so they start to drive across it. Then they come to the big trench where there are many cars parked. Someone set up a rinky dink bridge across the trench. The first bridge has wire railing, and it has a single pole to walk on, so it is basically a tightrope with handrails, and the wind is howling. There is a rock spire at the mid-point, and then it changes to a ladder to crawl across. Of course, something goes wrong, and they all barely make it across the bridge.

Then once they climb up the other side and summit a hill, there is a guy with a gun there waiting for them. He asks them what they are doing, and this bothers me greatly. Clearly this was a heavily trafficked spot. The other side was a parking lot, and someone built a structure so people could cross, why was he so surprised to see a family? Then he offers them a ride to his house, and he lives in a garage in France that seemed far away, but for some reason he was out there was a gun just randomly asking people what they are doing? It literally made no sense and made me so mad. 2 stars, it was boring, and I fell asleep and so did the guy next to me. Who wanted a Greenland sequel. I watched the original to get background, and it sucked too. Why would someone greenlight this idea. Who cares what happened to that family?

Primate on the other hand, I look upon much more favorably. This is like the ideal January release. It is a horror movie, it does not take itself too seriously, and I had low expectations for it. A family has a chimp, Ben, that they trained to do sign language, and he also uses a tablet to communicate as well. The dad of the family is deaf and an author, and so he goes on a business trip, leaving his two girls at home, and some of the older one’s friends as well. He knows Ben has gotten bitten, but he assumes it will be okay.

It is not okay! Ben has rabies and starts to attack these partying young adults. Basically, everyone gets trapped in the pool without their phones, and they have to find a way to get out and get help. Just like any good horror movie, the people start to get picked off one by one. The kills in this are absolutely brutal. I am talking jaws being torn off and faces being torn off. They do not shy away from the violence, and it is basically all being shown with some seriously gruesome practical effects.

Even the monkey does not look like CGI slop, and that is because there was a person in a monkey suit doing the acting, and it was incredible. It is so much better than the live action slop that people have been putting out. If you take the time to do something real and not just computer generate everything, it pays off. This movie made me cringe and feel grossed out, and that is not easy to do. So shout out to this fun creative movie about a chimp with rabies. Also the score was incredible!  

It did leave me with a question. They said that rabies is a fear of water at the beginning of the movie, and I do not think this is correct. After a quick google, it can be a side effect, but the opening card made it sound like rabies is just an animal being afraid of water. That part was silly.

This was not the only movie that made me cringe in January. The first movie that came out this year was We Bury the Dead. It starred Daisy Ridley, and I loved her as Rey in Star Wars, but since then she has only had one good movie, and she keeps trying to be an action star. So I gave her another chance, and it did not pay off in this zombie movie. The action is fleeting, and the only memorable aspect of the movie is the sound. The zombies make one of the most haunting noises I have ever heard. They grind their teeth intensely, and it was so bad that I just wanted to run out of the theater. I hated watching it happen, and I hated hearing it.

Initially the movie was going well, but then it tries to get too sentimental. Daisy Ridley’s character was trying to find her husbands body, and when she does, he was cheating on her, and it became this whole existential mess, and I just wanted to watch a movie where Daisy Ridley killed some zombies. Not a movie where Daisy Ridley must sort out whether she should have grief over her dead relationship or not.

So of all the movies I have watched this year Primate has been the best by far. It is funny to have a 3-star movie as the top of my rankings for the year, but hopefully 28 Years Later Bone Temple will take this spot. I rewatched the one from last year, and it is awesome, so hopefully even though the sequel is tonally different and with a different director, it will be just as good as 28 Years Later.