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...

Christspiracy: The Spirituality Secret review – Jesus was a vegetarian and other entertaining tosh

Unsupported assertions and gormless naivety drive this mishmash of pseudoscience and manipulated religious doctrine

Clearly scheduled to give vegetarians and vegans ammunition to shame carnivorous family members around the Easter and Passover dinner table, this passionate but unpersuasive documentary argues that Jesus was probably a vegetarian. Ultimately, the theory gets largely traced back to the apocryphal Gospel of the Ebionites, a text that’s been around since the second century; director Kip Andersen, however, makes a whole song and dance out of “discovering” this notion in a roundabout way, making for an entertainingly barmy quest. By the end, we’re informed that scientists have found the supposedly “happiest human on Earth”: a vegan Buddhist monk named Mateo Richard who spends most of his time meditating on compassion and has “high-amplitude gamma activity” in his brain which means it “fires on the highest levels”.

This particular mishmash of pseudoscientific buzz words is delivered via a montage of rostrum shots showing visually highlighted bits of text while an awestruck voiceover from Andersen himself synthesises the ideas. Before we can even absorb this information, the film skittishly moves on to the next notion that all the greatest thinkers in history were vegetarian. Leonardo da Vinci supposedly bought up all the chickens in his local market and then released them into the woods, which would have made the local foxes happy if no one else.

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