!!SPOILER WARNING: THIS REVIEW GIVES AWAY PLOT TWISTS!!
The box office success of American International Pictures‘ I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957) and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957) had proven that that recently identified and named demographic that featured so prominently in their titles was a potentially lucrative market for low budget exploitation specialists like AIP. Jerry Warren got in on the act with Teenage Zombies (1957) and we all know that Herbert L. Strock’s Blood of Dracula (1957) should really have been I Was a Teenage Vampire. With Roger Corman at the helm of his second “teenage” film (he’d directed Teenage Doll in 1957), AIP pressed ahead with the bizarre notion of crossing One Million B.C. (1940) with the teen movie and result is the tiresome Teenage Cave Man, a brain-numbing 65 minutes that both director and leading man would do their best to avoid discussing in years to come.
In what for most of the film appears to be a prehistoric wasteland, a small tribe of primitive men and women (who somehow have neatly tailored loincloths and a plentiful supply of hair products) eke out a meagre living, forbidden from entering the fertile land just across the river, fearful that a vengeful god that lives there will kill them if they do. A never named young man (Robert Vaughn) decides to risk it and crosses the river with a few other hardy souls and, after an awful lot of dithering about doing nothing of any interest, find that their “god” is a large human-like creature that seems to have been badly burned. After one of the tribesmen kills the “god” they discover that it’s really a very old man in a radiation suit – the tribe isn’t living in prehistoric times but in the aftermath of a nuclear war.
Teenage Cave Man is a twist ending in desperate need of a plot. It’s a minor variation on the “shaggy god story”, that strand of science fiction in which advanced travellers turn out to be named Adam and Eve, or in which supercomputers end the story hamiltonby announcing “let there be light!” Teenage Cave Man is the opposite of this most overworked of science fiction ideas and while you may not see the ending coming (it certainly isn’t signposted in any way) it won’t be entirely satisfactory, like to evoke a groan rather than a feeling of awe.
As a result, it’s a dreary affair, the cast – which includes familiar faces like Frank de Kova, Jonathan Haze, Ed Nelson and Beach Dickerson – wander aimlessly around those old faithfuls Bronson caves, Griffith Park and the Iverson Ranch looking in vain for something to do just to count down the clock. Vaughan and Darah Marshall get a bit of prehistoric/post-apocalyptic romancing to pass the time but for the most part, this is tedious fare peppered with stock footage lifted from the aforementioned One Million B.C. (the eponymous The She-Creature (1956) puts in an appearance near the end too). They need to be there really as there’s no other sense of menace or urgency about the film – it’s so cheap that a patch of quicksand into which poor Dickerson falls is very clearly just a pool of water with a few bits floating in it, hardly the terrifying natural danger that used to turn up in Tarzan films every few weeks.
R. Wright Campbell’s screenplay – he’d previously written Lon Chaney biopic Man of a Thousand Faces in 1957 and would go on to much better things when he co-wrote Corman‘s version of The Masque of the Red Death in 1964 – has nothing much to add to the silly twist ending but does have a ludicrous line in pompous dialogue that leaves the cast sounding like they’re trying out for a particularly bad amateur dramatics production of Shakespeare.
Corman shot the film as Prehistoric World and was not at all happy about its rebranding by AIP – in later years he would people that he’d never directed a film called Teenage Cave Man. Vaughan was even less happy about it and with good reason. He was still early in his career (though at 26 his teenage years were far behind him) and prancing about in a loincloth waxing pretentious while wielding a positively weedy looking bow and arrow was a memory that he was never really keen to recall in any detail. He was on his way to becoming The Man from U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968) and one suspects that he was, quite rightly, far prouder of that.
Teenage Cave Man was released on a double bill with How to Make a Monster (1957) and both films had their titles, if not their plots, lifted for a brace of TV films made under the Creature Features banner in 2002. Slightly retitled Teenage Caveman, it was directed by, of all people, Larry Clarke of Kids (1995), Bully (2001) and Ken Park (2002) infamy and makes no bones about being set in a post-apocalyptic world from the start.
Crew
Directed by: Roger Corman; © 1958 Malibu Productions; An American-International picture; Executive Producers: James H. Nicholson and Samuel Z. Arkoff; Produced by: Roger Corman; Screenplay by: R. Wright Campbell; Director of Photography: Floyd Crosby; Film Editor: Irene Mora; Music by: Al Glasser; Costumer: Margo Corso; Beastman Costume Designer: Paul Blaisdell [uncredited]; Dinosaur Sequences: Ellis Burman [uncredited], Roy Seawright [uncredited]
Cast
Robert Vaughn [the symbol maker’s teenage son]; Darah Marshall [the blonde maiden]; Leslie Bradley [the symbol maker]; Frank De Kova [the black-bearded one]; Charles Thompson [member of the tribe]; June Jocelyn [the symbol maker’s wife]; Jonathan Haze [the curly-haired boy]; Beach Dickerson [fair-haired boy/man from burning plains/tom-tom player/bear]; Ed Nelson [blond tribe member]; Robert Shayne [the keeper of the small fire]; Marshall Bradford [member of the tribe]; Joseph H. Hamilton [member of the tribe]; Barboura Morris [young female tribe member – uncredited]
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