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...

‘He was always voraciously watching’: Scorsese’s secret life as an obsessive VHS archivist

The Oscar-winning director has donated over 50 storage boxes of tapes that show a devoted interest in recording films and shows from the '80s to the 2000s

In the basement of the University of Colorado Boulder’s main library, an 85-year-old stone fortress built in the Italian rural style, the archives of the school’s Rare and Distinctive Collections occupy rows of shelves as far as the eye can see. Here, amid yellowed books, historical maps and medieval manuscripts, Martin Scorsese has quietly made public a very private preoccupation. More than 50 storage boxes hold thousands of VHS tapes that contain films and television programs Scorsese recorded directly from broadcast television. The renowned director and film preservationist, it turns out, was also, for decades, a prolific guerrilla archivist.

Long before YouTube and Netflix gave the world instant access to a deep repository of media, Scorsese began the project of amassing his own private on-demand video library. In each week’s TV Guide, he would note the movies and shows that caught his interest. A full-time video archivist in Scorsese’s New York office would then record the telecasts from a kind of audiovisual hub made up of multiple VCRs and monitors, which could often be active at all hours. The tapes were meticulously labeled, cataloged initially using a library-like card system and later a computer, and filed away for Scorsese’s personal viewing and research.

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