Le monde oublié

CAVEGIRL is an awful concoction mixing the usual '80s high school comedy hijinks with a Stone Age adventure. The main character is an overweight creepy guy who enjoys spying on women, and he ends up being transported back to prehistoric times by a secret military experiment. There he meets and falls in love with a beautiful blonde cave girl and the two have various adventures as they evade grizzly bears and cannibal tribes.

This really is hopeless, barrel scraping stuff, and yet there's a little of the so-bad-it's-good vibe going on. The script is hilariously awful, and the whole thing has generally been made to show off breasts, although there's not as much nudity as you'd expect given the set-up. Daniel Roebuck (THE RIVER'S EDGE) is awful as the uncharismatic lead, although buxom starlet Cindy Ann Thompson (NOT OF THIS EARTH) is a little better as the vacuous cave girl and at least gets into the spirit of the thing.

Everywhere the paucity of the budget is apparent, with rubbish fur bikinis and a general cheap-looking shooting style out in a quarry somewhere. Absolutely nothing that happens in it is any good or indeed memorable, and yet maybe that's part of the charm. ONE MILLION YEARS BC this ain't!

Cave Girl is a humorous tongue in cheek romantic comedy that follows the romantic relationship of bumbling modern day Rex and beautiful and sexy pre-historic cave girl Eba. The movie follows the bumbling Rex through a series of slapstick pranks and mishaps that culminate in his transport 25,000 years back in time to meet and fall in love with the beautiful Eba. And, along the way, Rex becomes a man that saves Eba and the rest of the local clan from cannibals. Eventually, though, Rex and Eba must face reality. Will Rex return to his own time, where Eba cannot possible fit in, or will he stay and build a life with Eba and the rest of the tribe. This movie is a humorous, and at times poignant, look at the trials, tribulations, opportunities and decisions that young people often face as they come of age. Well worth a look.

B-movie producers Crown International Pictures seemed to churn out a lot of comedies in the 80's. The majority of them, I have discovered to my cost, are decidedly under par. Like most, Cave Girl has a title and cover that suggests it might be decent fun at the very least but in practice this is yet another laugh-free zone from good old Crown. It tells the story of a nerdy anthropology student called Rex who touches a coloured rock while out on a field trip and is somehow or other subsequently sent back in time to the prehistoric era. Almost immediately he meets cute cave girl and then more stuff happens.

You would think that an 80's time-travelling teen-comedy would at the very least have a few ideas up its sleeve. Well, you'd be wrong in this case as despite the potential in the set-up, all this one more or less boils down to is our protagonist trying to teach the cave girl English in order to facilitate having sex with her. It should be said at this point that Rex is a notably irritating central character who, despite being offered to us as the sympathetic underdog, came across little more than a sex pest. Not only that but in spite of his character being a high school student, the actor that played him looked like he was pushing forty. Needless to say, the antics of this individual are somewhat alienating and don't generate anything approaching empathy.

The film itself is a half-hearted sex comedy at best, with an early scene in a girl's locker room that did at least provide boobs which is never exactly ever going to be a bad production value. But really, the nudity is in short supply here overall and you really have to get into its humour and set-up to have any chance of appreciating it. Unfortunately, the comedy is really bad, resorting to a fart joke and an interminable sequence involving shaving cream. The prehistoric set-up is the only thing that really provides any interest but even that is pretty underwhelming on the whole, with boring cave people and little in the way of much else, aside from an encounter with a tribe of cannibals, which did enliven things a bit I have to say, although even that wasn't exactly very interesting. For a prehistoric comedy, you'd really be better off watching the cult movie Eegah (1962) or even the more recent California Man (1992); neither of those are exactly stellar stuff but both are marginally better than Cave Girl.

The 1980's were a virtual golden age for low budget teen sex comedies, a reliably successful genre whose purveyors cranked out new titles throughout the decade with such frenzied regularity that many video stores gave these movies their own dedicated section. Cavegirl is fairly prototypical aside from its admittedly novel concept, neither the worst nor the best of its species, but it's still a good time despite its sophomoric execution making something like Hardbodies look like a masterpiece by comparison.

The action centers around a hopeless high school egghead named Rex (played by an actor who looks to be in his late 20's, naturally) who encounters some nebulously defined magic crystals during a field trip to a mine and somehow gets transported back in time to the dawn of homo erectus. There, he meets the titular Cavegirl, a gorgeous neolithic nymphette named Eva, and proceeds to spend the rest of the movie awkwardly lusting after her and teaching her to say the word "boobs".

The bulk of the hijinks here are more amusing than truly funny, but this flick is still fairly endearing in its own quirky way. The introduction meant to establish Rex as a lovable loser is done away with in the first ten minutes, which mostly consist of his classmates punking him with a series of pranks like dropping firecrackers on him while he's sitting on the toilet and leading him into the girls' locker room to be chased by a group of topless women wielding tennis rackets. Oddly, other than those gals, there only seems to be five other students at Rex's school and their entire purpose for attending seems to be to torment him. Even odder, Rex doesn't seem particularly put-off by their shenanigans-though one gag results in the entire backside of his trousers being torn off, he's wearing fresh pants in the next scene, which suggests he's so resigned to their oafish antics that he plans ahead by bringing an extra pair of jeans to class just in case.

The story hits its stride once Rex reaches the "Stone Age" (although the "Stone Age" looks suspiciously like the California mountains). Once we meet Eva (played by the stunning Cindy Ann Thompson), it isn't hard to gather why her presence was flagged as the focal point of the film. Amidst a series of pratfalls, flatulence vignettes, and Rex's thwarted attempts to score with his prehistoric princess, he gradually integrates himself into her furry-loinclothed family and becomes one of their rock-dwelling tribe. There's also a fleeting subplot about Eva and her squad being kidnapped by cannibals and Rex conquering his geeky skittishness to come to their rescue, but since that entire thread is introduced and resolved within the span of exactly five minutes, it's rendered more of a skit than a legitimate conflict.

But hey, taking a caper like Cavegirl seriously is missing the point. Those with a healthy appetite for '80s nostalgia will have plenty to chew on here. The whole production is so evocative of its era it practically serves as a postcard, and a smattering of choice synth-rock numbers by bands so obscure they aren't even identified in the credits are almost worth the movie alone. Rex turns out to be a likeable goofball, Eva is a delight to behold every time she's on the screen, and despite the horny-adolescent mindset of the humor their clumsy courtship unfolds with a genuine sweetness that makes it difficult not to root them on.

There are certainly raunchier and funnier entries in this crowded canon, yet Cavegirl has enough appealing attributes to make it worth a $2.99 rental-which is precisely the result the producers were counting on when it was released. Today, it serves as both an enjoyable reminder of a simpler time and an untaxing way to turn off your brain for 80 minutes. And as far as I'm concerned, that result is equally worthy.

Although it had a horrible storyline, the one perk was the beautiful Cynthia Thompson. She stole my heart in this movie. I would watch it again just to see her. It is reminiscence of Ringo Starr's Caveman, all the campiness of an Ernest movie. Cyntia Thompson and Ringo should collaborate and make a really great prehistoric movie. If not for the nude scenes and and a few other things, children may have very well made this movie a hit. Kids love these type of movies. Too bad it ended up on the all time worst list. It is also too bad Cynthia Ann Thompson has not done a lot more in her career. I would love to see her do some fairy tale movies for the kids (and for me). She has such a beautiful face and smile.