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...

Timestalker review – Alice Lowe’s anti-romcom is a darkly hilarious spin through history

The actor and film-maker’s ingenious comedy sees her play a gamut of characters who meet gory ends chasing a not-worth-it love interest

The Taoist philosopher Zhuangzi dreamed he was a butterfly – but couldn’t be sure if the butterfly wasn’t the one having the dream about him. Film-maker Alice Lowe dreams her way into a cosmically recurring persona in this likably chaotic, flawed comedy; she plays a woman who regenerates Blackadderishly throughout the years, from the 1680s to the 1980s, forever in love with the same man, forever destined to sacrifice herself for him, almost but not quite in possession of the knowledge that this guy is unworthy of her. At each stage, the incarnations of the past are perhaps dream-memories and the personae of the future are prophecies. Or … is she just very, very mad?

In 1688, Lowe is Agnes, a humble Scottish maidservant who is enamoured of a heretical preacher (Aneurin Barnard) who is about to be executed. In 1793, she is a poutingly bored noblewoman who conceives an erotic fascination for a dandy highwayman in the Adam Ant style, with the memorably annoying name of Alex O’Nine Ribbons (again Barnard). And in 1980, with leg-warmers and a frizzy hairstyle which makes her look like Barry Gibb or the Cowardly Lion, she plays a British woman in a drolly unconvincing-looking New York who has become a stalker-superfan of a new romantic pop star (Barnard once more). In addition, she is briefly to be seen as a magician’s assistant in Cleopatra costume in 1940 and even more briefly – almost subliminally – as some kind of Jane Eyre-ish schoolmarm in 1847 who is decapitated by a carriage wheel. (This last episode is so bafflingly fleeting that some of it must surely have been lost in the edit.)

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