Teenage Caveman

'Teenage Caveman' is Larry Clark letting his hair down and having a ball making a wonderfully silly exploitation movie. Clark's controversial 'Kids' and 'Bully' mixed their often prurient look at teenage sex and substance abuse with some serious social comment. This time around it's all deliberate provocation and the "message" while still there buried beneath the sleaze and general wackiness is not to be taken all that seriously. This is not a serious movie folks! It is a rollicking good time that is designed to appeal to your libido and sense of humour not your intellect. After all, the source material is a legendary Roger Corman sci fi cheapie which was probably made for the equivalent of the catering budget here, and it wasn't exactly Dostoevsky in the first place, know what I'm saying? Clark and script writer Christos N. Gage only really take the title and initial premise from the original movie, and after the first twenty minutes or so they take things in a completely different and more outrageous direction. The young cast are mostly vaguely recognizable from bad teen movies and cheesy TV shows and are adequate at best. Apart from a memorable bit by Abel Ferrara regular Paul Hipp as Andrew Keegan's sleazy shaman Dad in the opening cave sequences of the movie, the only performer here with any real charisma or future potential is the sexy and seductive bombshell Tiffany Limos. She is really hot and should continue in the exploitation genre. Everyone else here is pretty forgettable. Now there's no way I'm going to argue that this is a good movie (unlike 'Bully' which really is something special), but it is a fun one, though probably not the kinda thing that most of its intended audience will "get". I enjoyed it for what it was - silly, sexy, sci fi stupidity.

In a post-apocalyptic world, the few survivors live in huddled tribes, barely surviving. In one tribe, the ruler refuses to let the people slip into the sin that brought the old world to an end – and sex is banned. He does, however, permit himself the pick of young girls for himself. When he selects his son's girlfriend, David is forced to kill him to protect her and is then left to die in the wilderness as punishment. His friends decide to rescue him and head off into the wilderness, where they find one of the fallen cities of the old world. Walking into it, they get caught in a storm and wake up in a modern (well, old-fashioned) apartment with beautiful young couple Neil and Judith. Quickly the group discover that the restrictions of the caves are gone and the old ways of sex, drink and drugs are the very things of daily life. However it also becomes quickly evident that things are not what they seem.

With all the negative reviews on this site I had to see it for myself because I found it hard to believe that the man that gave me Kids could fail to at least make an interesting film. Watching it, I can see plenty in the plot that could have been interesting, could have been insightful and could have made for a challenging piece of thought within a sci-fi frame; after all, it could have been a cautionary tale about sex, about a sexually transmitted virus that is part of the world ending, of teenagers self-harming with no consequences. The potential was there and I did think I was open to seeing these themes and I did put in work to try and go with it and let the subtexts come through. After the "infamous" twenty minute orgy of drugs and nudity I still had this approach although there was very little in it to encourage me to keep the faith.

First off, those tuning in for sexual titillation will be disappointed as the orgy is pretty cold and lacks anything in terms of excitement. It is a bit annoying because I couldn't shake the feeling that the camera was revelling in the naked teens, drug use and other excesses. With Kids there was enough substance to cover the accusations of exploitative material but here I just didn't think there was. With the focus on excesses, the narrative was not that well developed and the whole "virus" thing didn't engage me at all. The subtexts drift in and out but the writing is not intelligent enough to bring them out; such a shame because at times you could see the parallels between the plight of the characters and the struggles of real teens (specifically in the fear of sex in Sarah and the sexual aggression of Vincent). By the end of the film I was left with a gory, nonsensical film that doesn't do anything well at all.

Of course a cast of rather hapless teenagers and twenty-somethings doesn't help because they might not have been able to work with good plotting and dialogue if it had been given to them. Keegan is a bit of a clot; Hillman overacts like he is trying to save his life; Subkoff shows that she could have done more but her material is too weak to let her prove it. Jasso is obvious but has a nice natural swagger to him that may be useful in the future for small "teen criminal" roles in other things. Limos and Grant are both pretty good looking but they cannot deliver a convincing line or even a convincing slap for all the tea in China. Clark's direction is interesting at least; at points the cinematography is nicely washed out, blending colours into frames to depict changes in emotion and several other nice touches – if only he had been able to draw out value from the material – the odd nice visual touch is not enough.

Overall this is a poor film but I will not be adding my voice to those that simply dismiss it as rubbish with a lazy twenty word review. It had potential and it had subtexts that could have worked but it just does nothing with them. The plot makes little or no sense as the film ends up focusing on the excesses rather than the substance of the film; although I tried to work through it I have to admit defeat and the final 20 minutes was a noisy load of heartless gore that made no sense even within its own logic. Overall a pointless film that will have a cult following for the sex, gore and "different" plot; some will see it as a stupid load of missed opportunities but the vast majority will not care what it could have done and will just give up on the exploitative and nasty mess.

So I was flipping channels one night before bedtime and happened into the middle of some crazy party scene with half-naked girls. Good enough for me. I set the VCR and went to bed, but I was back in front of the TV 10 minutes later. There was just something about this movie that was oddly appealing. And not just Tiffany Limos. Or Andrew Keegan's samurai hair and drag queen outfit with big shoulder pads and peekaboo belly button. Despite the low production values, lack of plot and gaping holes of logic, little gems of brilliance were scattered here and there. Too bad they were too few and too far between.

Having done some reading about "Teenage Caveman" and its director, Larry Clark, I'm reminded of something Ben Stein wrote in his series of articles, "The Diary of a Mad Screenwriter," about a producer friend whose every project could be summed up as: "Teenage girls discovering their bodies as they come of age..." Maybe he was writing about Clark. I certainly can't fault the guy for, as another reviewer suggested, using movies as an excuse to see naked young girls. My only gripe is the buzzkill: When the exotically delicious Tiffany Limos gets naked and then the other half-naked girl EXPLODES...well, that's not the sort of climax I was hoping for. Kind of like in the worthless-except-for-topless-Jeannie- Millar "Starquest II," where instead of getting some more nakedness, we're treated to a rubber head getting a rubber monster finger through its rubber eye. Yeesh. And speaking of that flick, who doesn't notice the amazing similarities between the two movies?

Kudos to Richard Hillman, who was a heck of a lot of fun to watch, even with the sound off. Although not in the same way that Limos was, of course. Please note that I never said that "Teenage Caveman" is actually good. But it was intriguing enough to make me write a review, which says something. There's definitely a rental in my near future. Heck, I might even add this one to my DVD collection. Thanks, Larry!

(I actually did purchase this. Then I traded it away. No regrets.)

Oh yeah...what WERE they thinking. This film offers absolutely NO plot, it is obvious that director and producers just thought "Well, if we just show plenty of female nudity, nobody will realize that there IS no story!"..

I KNOW this is a b-movie, and I have a huge love for those, but THIS could not even quality as a Z-movie, I'm actually reluctant to call this nothing more but a badly produced softcore porno-flick..

Man.. If you like movies that makes just a LITTLE sense, stay clear of this. Bad effects, horrible acting - you would actually think they simply picked the "actors" who were willing to drop all thier clothes, and then forgot that their TALENT was totally absent....that's a way to make a career aswell, I suppose...good for them, bad for all the rest of us watching..

In these times were scripts are very hard to get produced, you wonder how a piece of garbage like this could slip through....someone must have had a period of incredibly poor judgment..

-10/10

Where to begin? This headliner at the Fecal Film Festival is without a doubt the worst thing I have ever seen. Entirely without any redeeming value whatsoever, not even camp value mind you... this film lacks any substantive plot or story line that is discernable, nor comprehendable dialogue, nor even interest as a soft core porno.

Larry Clark's disturbing debut 'Kids' was controversial for it's depiction of homeless children doing drugs and having sex on the streets of New York. Well, after seeing Teenage Caveman you begin to realize that that subject matter is a favorite of Clark's and he is less gritty filmmaker than closet pedophile.

The film even looks bad... not even visually interesting, this film was an hour and a half of my life STOLEN from me. I don't know what the budget of this cinematic excrement was, but if it was more than $500, the production designer should be arrested for theft. The film appears to be shot entirely inside a closet, with the exception of two or three minutes of exteriors with the appearance that they were filmed in vacant lots and the homeless people who live there were displaced until filming was complete.

I LIKE BAD MOVIES... Ed Wood films are very entertaining to me, because I can take enjoyment in what was going on behind the scenes and the real "camp" laughs. This film can't even boast that. It is BORING. Entirely forgettable... I had to write this review quickly before this 'piece de merde' slipped from my mind.

I think Clark was trying to make some kind of statement about the nature of organized religion, maybe about drug use, something about sexual discovery... but if anyone can figure out what the hell the message was... post it because it was way too subtle for me to pick up on.

About the sex... like everything in else in this Ishtar-wanna-be, it was bad. Clark picked "actors" who were not only unable to deliver any dialogue, but who were just plain unattractive. People who I can't imagine anyone wanting to see naked, even after twenty beers. Particularly of note as being an exceptionally bad actress is the Asian girl who set new records for a lack of screen presence. Even the sexually explicit dialogue she delivers is done so poorly that it would make the most sexually repressed pre-teenage boy yawn. (The only dialogue that I can remember now involves a young boy learning to read from Penthouse forum, and stumbling over "reaming out my wife's bunghole.") I hope whoever wrote the script is proud. I'm embarrassed for repeating it.

In fact... everyone involved with this drek should be ashamed. A film school excercise should be to take the footage from this steaming peanut loaf and put together anything that makes sense. Anyone who succeeds should get a masters.

Perhaps the sci-fi geeks who "must" see anything with a special effect in it may want to sit through this Clockwork-Orange-torture-film, but even the effects are bad. If viewed for it's technical merits, the Computer Generated effects appear to have been done on someone's laptop while riding aboard a shaky bus. The makeup on the bad-guy creature is laughably bad, but not enough so to be entertaining.

Take my advice and steer clear of 'Teenage Caveman.' As a parent, I would rather have my son or daughter watch a snuff film... at least they might learn something from it. THIS IS THE FIRST FILM I HAVE EVER SEEN TO HAVE NO REDEEMING VALUE WHATSOEVER.