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...

Camouflage review – the dark past of Argentina’s dirty war detention centres

Author Félix Bruzzone fronts this haunting film about Campo de Mayo, where his mother was among tens of thousands of people who ‘disappeared’ under the dictatorship

The dark past of Campo de Mayo, a military camp that once served as a vast detention centre during Argentina’s so-called dirty war, is excavated in Jonathan Perel’s haunting documentary. Following noted author Félix Bruzzone as he jogs alongside the infamous site, the film is structured around the writer’s run in which the past and the present entwine. His encounters with witnesses of the dictatorship’s atrocities show that history is far from dormant, but a living, breathing thing.

Having lived in the area, Bruzzone was only recently made aware of his family ties to the site. Abducted by the secret police and taken to Campo de Mayo, his mother was among the tens of thousands who “disappeared” under the military regime. This painful memory is mirrored by Bruzzone’s conversation with an archaeologist, who talks about the human bones buried under the base, as well as the lush vegetation that flourishes above ground. The juxtaposition is startling if morbid. Indeed, as an estate agent tells Bruzzone: in spite of the camp’s horrific legacy, the prices of nearby properties have steadily risen over the years.

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