Primitive War review – it’s Green Berets vs dinosaurs in cheerfully cheesy Vietnam war gorefest

Set to an on-the-nose soundtrack of Creedence Clearwater, an elite squad of soldiers are suitably unprepared for their large-toothed assailants in this jungle thriller Aimed squarely and unabashedly at viewers who love soldiers, gore and dinosaurs – as well as dinosaurs goring soldiers – this adaptation of Ethan Pettus’s 2017 novel is deeply repetitive but weirdly watchable. Although shot in Australia with a mostly Australian cast sprinkled with a few American actors, it’s supposed to be set in Vietnam in the late 1960s as the US armed forces take on the Viet Cong. But there are other forces to contend with, and we don’t just mean covert Chinese or Soviet operatives, although the latter do feature significantly here. It turns out a nefarious scientific experiment by one of the aforementioned factions has accidentally ushered a whole army of dinosaurs into the jungle and they’ve begun gaily munching their way through anyone who gets in their way. When one squad of Green Berets go miss...

‘Truly unwatchable’: writers on their toughest scenes of movie violence

For the return of the gory Saw franchise, Guardian writers remember the hardest scenes of big screen violence they’ve had to endure

A rape-revenge thriller told in reverse, Gaspar Noé’s infamous provocation opens with the revenge part first, as two men (Vincent Cassel and Albert Dupontel) embark on a frantic search for the monster who sexually assaulted and mutilated the woman (Monica Bellucci) at the center of their lives. As they descend into a BDSM club called The Rectum, Noé levels his own kind of assault on the audience, with the camera swirling relentlessly down this chaotic inferno and the soundtrack enforcing a feeling of deep disorientation, like a carnival ride due for decommission. When one of the men finally identifies their target – falsely, as it happens – he pulverizes his face with a fire extinguisher, the camera following every swing. Irréversible will later stage the rape through one long, pitilessly static take, but this sequence is a blow to the solar plexus, and we never fully recover from it. Scott Tobias

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