Writer-director Luke Sparke took some bold swings with his dinosaur horror movie Primitive War, and it yielded an over-the-top, riotous blast of a movie that somehow manages to compete with box office juggernaut Jurᴀssic World Rebirth for the тιтle of 2025’s best dinosaur movie.

Adapted from Ethan Pettus’ 2017 novel of the same name, Primitive War has a simple yet wonderfully preposterous core concept: What would happen if a Vietnam War recon group encountered vicious dinosaurs in the jungles of Southeast Asia? Sparke understands the ᴀssignment here, which is to ramp up the action and horror elements to create a wildly entertaining B-movie.

Smashing the war genre together with dinosaur horror shouldn’t work as well as it does here, but Sparke manages to infuse a surprising amount of historical Vietnam War accuracy into the movie without skimping on the dinosaur action. Despite such an unhinged narrative to work with, Sparke and Pettus, who helped adapt the screenplay, play it as a straight horror-drama, with only occasional comic relief.

Unlike its star-studded dino movie compeтιтion, the Australian-made Primitive War‘s cast isn’t loaded with noteworthy names. Jeremy Piven (Entourage) and Tricia Helfer (Battlestar Galactica) are probably the most recognizable faces in the movie, both using somewhat silly but decent enough accents given the nature of the movie.

What’s most impressive about the rest of the cast, led by Ryan Kwanten (True Blood) as the recon unit’s leader, is the amount of chemistry they have. The entire cast does good work given the material they’re working with, and I’d be remiss if I didn’t call out Aaron Glenane as the unit’s sniper, Logan Stovall, who struggles with deep-seated trauma that manifests itself in sporadic suicidal thoughts.

Primitive War Makes Dinosaurs Legitimately Scary

The comparisons with Jurᴀssic World Rebirth were always inevitable with Primitive War given the proximity of its release date, but there is one particular element that made the low-budget movie more enjoyable for me than Universal’s tentpole spectacle. In addition to presenting a much more diverse array of dinosaurs with surprising accuracy to the fossil record, Primitive War‘s dinosaurs are terrifying.

Obviously, the scare factor of any dinosaur horror movie comes from the carnivores, and Primitive War takes great care to present its predators as strong, agile, vicious monsters. The de facto main villains of the movie are the black-feathered Utahraptors, which are intimidating due to their size, speed, and intelligence.

The rest of the movie is littered with other threats, including a horde of deinonychus, which are smaller than the Utahraptors but no less dangerous as pack hunters, a male and female pair of T. rexes, and amphibious spinosauruses. Most of the motion and behavior of the dinosaurs in Primitive War is consistent with their Jurᴀssic World counterparts, but in Primitive War they’re just a bit faster, more vicious, and more intense.

Perhaps the most horrific scene involves a flock of mᴀssive flying Quetzalcoatlus, famously recognized as the largest flying animals to have ever existed. They descend upon a small unit of Russian soldiers fighting and, after goring them in spectacular fashion, slurp up their intestines with their disturbingly long tongues.

Primitive War’s Visuals Are Stunning Given The Budget

By far the most impressive element of Primitive War is how incredible the visuals look given the movie’s modest budget. Most estimates place the overall production budget at $7-8 million, making the sheer volume of CGI dinosaur action staggering to think about. While the CGI is not always perfect, the dinosaurs are miles better than anything you’d see in a typical straight-to-streaming monster movie.

Sparke’s movie feels like a benchmark achievement. Like the Oscar-winning Godzilla Minus One, Primitive War‘s visuals are good enough to make you wonder where all the money goes for the atmospheric budgets of big-studio blockbusters.

Over the course of the film, Sparke manages to cram in several awe-inspiring scenes that not only look incredible but are incredibly entertaining. The movie’s climax is straight out of an eight-year-old boy’s dizziest daydream, and I mean that in the most complimentary fashion possible.

If you’ve ever wanted to see a T. rex battle a tank, or see a small group of soldiers fend off dozens of charging, jumping, slashing raptors with machine guns and grenades, Primitive War has you covered. It’s a B-movie that completely understands what it is, and even if it doesn’t get a wide release, it’s destined to be a cult classic for both horror and war movie fans.