Silly. Really Silly


*********POSSIBLE SPOILERS AHEAD*************

I have to hand it to the guys that made this flick: it is one of the silliest movies I have seen in a long time. When I first heard about this film, I thought that it could be described as another movie told from the opposite point of view. The other movie that I am talking about is called World Without End, and it concerns the first US mission into space, and when the heroes start their return trip, they encounter a great violence, and crash-land on an unknown planet, where they meet with (among others) a bunch of strangely deformed creatures. After many adventures the heroes discover that they are on the earth far in the future, centuries after a devastating atomic war. The deformed creatures turn out to be mutated humans.
I thought at first that TC was a sort of a WWE told from the POV of the mutants, but it is clearly not. Teenage Caveman appears to set in the distant past, but is it really? Like in WWE, the earth has underwent devastating upheavals with the result that there are only small groups of survivors.
In this film, a very young Robert Vaughn plays a young cave man who wants to explore the forbidden areas where his fellows don't dare go. His desire to discover sets him apart from his tribe who are reluctant to follow him. Vaughn's nemesis is played by the veteran actor Frank de Kova, perhaps best known as the Indian chief in the TV series F Troop. The acting was actually not bad, but the rest of the film was really silly.
Still and all, this film was watchable and if you must know the truth, I liked it. Just don't ask me why.

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Indeed. But, hey, yes, it is watchable. The best thing they did was to at least play it straight. If they had tried to somehow make fun of it or take it too lightly, it would have been a genuine disaster.

Plus the ending was neat, no?

Actually, the most out-of-place performer in it to me is poor Robert Shane, as the Keeper of the Small Fires or whatever. He sounds too urbane, too cerebral, for a caveman movie. He turned up in so much sci-fi, good, bad and indifferent, in addition to his bits in bigger films (NORTH BY NORTHWEST, for example), and I always thought he was a better actor than the small and/or crummy roles he usually got. But then, we'll always have his Inspector Henderson in "Adventures of Superman" from TV.

I give Corman maybe a B for effort, trying something different on what looks like a budget of $1.17, though there's way too much stock footage from ONE MILLION B.C., UNKNOWN ISLAND, THE SHE-CREATURE and our friend DTWE. And the following year Robert Vaughn got an Oscar nomination for his performance in THE YOUNG PHILADELPHIANS, so he got away clean from TC. Only problem with the DVD is it isn't in its original widescreen format, and in the case of this movie, it needs all the help it can get.

Funny story about the filming of TC: There was an actor named Beach Dickerson, who was in small parts in a few Corman flicks, and in TC he was cast as the young caveman who drowns in the quicksand bog. According to Dickerson, the next day he was there, watching the rest of the filming, assuming his work was done, when Corman spotted him and asked him why the hell he was standing around. When Dickerson said he was "dead", Corman ordered him to grab a set of tom-toms and beat them at his own funeral scene, assuming no one would recognize him! Later, he dressed Dickerson up as the old man who rides in on a horse and is killed by the tribe, assuming here that Dickerson could fall off a horse without a problem (more or less, as it turned out). Finally, he had Dickerson put on the bear costume used when the young men from the tribe fight the bear, and he is "killed" again. Dickerson always loved the fact that in this movie he got to die three times on screen and even play music at one of his own funerals!

Keep me apprised of your further posts. I've missed the conversations.



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Do you enjoy Stephen King movies? I have a lot of them.

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Never been a big King fan, actually. The only movie from one of his works I have is THE DEAD ZONE, which I really enjoy in spite of its too-obvious use of Canada subbing for the US. I like CARRIE and CHRISTINE but have never purchased them. MISERY I find too uncomfortable to watch (!) -- maybe because it's the most "realistic" of his filmed works, though of course it's very good. Overall I think H'wood has probably not done justice to a lot of his stories, but honestly most of them simply don't hold much appeal to me.

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Personally, I think The Stand is the best King movie that I have. It is a post-apocalyptic tale which is one of the main reasons that I like it. Also part of it takes place here in Kansas. It reminds me of a story that I wrote back when I was in Jr. High. This was in the mid-1960's.

My story began at the end of the Second World War. A Nazi scientist had filled a container with a deadly virus, then buried it just before he was captured by the Americans. He was hanged after the war, and never revealed that he had buried the container.
Flash forward twenty or thirty years and a farmer plowing his field breaks the container open and contracts the disease, whatever it was. It proves to be highly contagious and has a mortality rate of close to 100%. It spreads like wilfire throughout the world and wipes out the vast majority of the world's population.
The story then turns to the plague's survivors, and told of their adventures.
Some where along the way, the story got lost; after all, it was more than forty years ago. I might just write it again one of these days.

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Sounds a lot more interesting than stuff like 28 DAYS! Why NOT pick it up again? Especially the post-disaster aspects, the kind of thing I've always found the more intriguing part of apocalypse stories than the "cause" portion. Like WWE -- the post-nuclear story is much more fun (wrong word?) than would have been the tale leading up to, or about, 2188.

Just promise to keep the word "Teenage" out of the title.

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Hey man, face it; post-apocalyptic stories ARE FUN! There's nothing wrong with that at all.
I've heard of different scenarios. One is like mine, another is the Russians or the Communist Chinese start something and it gets away from them. One more has the Chinese accidentally infecting their rice supply, and facing mass starvation, take desperate measures. Yet another scenario has a space bug coming from a meteor.
There are a lot of possibilities.
And I promise: no 'teenage' in the title!

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A three-eyed smiley-face. Now that's post-apocalyptic!

Dare I say...Naga-esque? In the land of the mutates, the three-eyed man is king.

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No, Naga had only one eye. Closer to the monster in DTWE don't you think?

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No, I know Naga had only one eye ("no depth perception" in Borden's hopeful pre-fight size-up), just a comment on eye-number variations. Actually, I almost wrote "teenage caveman-esque" because of the three-eyed mutant from DTWE -- I forget, isn't there a shot of that/him inserted into TC? I know THE SHE CREATURE got a cameo there.

What did they say when they chose a new chief in WWE? "The eyes have it."? Or, in their case, The eye has it.

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I have only one thing to say to that.

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Does your DVD of TC have The Viking Women? What did you think of that?

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You mean, "The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent"? Sorry, never heard of it.

Kidding, of course -- love that title. Yep, same DVD, but I actually only watched a piece of it when I got the disc and never did go back to see it in its entirety. I should do so -- I have seen it, not for a number of years, and my reaction as I recall -- well, Gary, you summed it up in the title of this thread: silly, really silly. TC I think appeals to me more, but to be sure I do have to go back and watch TSOTVWATVTTWOTGSS.

Sounds like an Indian burial ground.

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<TSOTVWATVTTWOTGSS>

Yeah, it does sound like an Indian burial ground, doesn't it? Either that or one of the names on one of those Welsh road signs. Thank goodness for C&P!

Gawd!! It's good to be back among civilized people. I just came from a minor encounter with a troll over on the board for The Stand. This (presumed)little snot seemed to want to pick a fight.
That is one of the things that I like about these IMDB boards: there are really very few trolls here.
Anyway, I saw TSOTVWATVTTWOTGSS, and it was every bit as silly as TC.

So, where have you been lately, my freind? I haven't heard from you for a while. I checked over at WWE, a couple of days ago, and there doesn't seem to anything going on there.

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Sorry, and I've missed our conversations. Past two weeks have been very busy -- I was sick for over a week and just now am hitting a week of heavy meetings (I'm on a few civic boards), so my calendar won't be clear until after Memorial Day.

I've been watching some Japanese sci-fi flicks that another poster ("controller of planet x"), who I've seen on various sites, recommended from an outfit called Video Daikaiju -- stuff like "Rodan", "Mothra", "The H-Man", "Battle in Outer Space", etc. -- all in the original Japanese, subtitled of course, and widescreen where used. I grew up watching that stuff and it was great to see them in the originals, and original formats. Do you have any interest in that kind of thing? I'd never heard of the company but after inquiring of "controller" I went on line and ordered a few titles from them. They were great to deal with and the quality of the discs is excellent, though basically no extras. Much better than the US versions, except, oddly, "Rodan", which I think in many ways is better in its dubbed US release. My orders were handled very promptly and I had the DVDs within 36 hours of ordering, and no S&H if you order more than one title (most at $15 flat). Of course, my service might have been as quick as it was as the outfit's in New Jersey, only about 40 miles from where I live in NY, but even so, it was really fast. Web address is videodaikaiju.com, you have to arrange payment procedures through a company they use, and a catalogue costs $2, but you get $2 off your first order, so basically it's free.

Anyway, I thought of you because one of the titles I got is "The Last War" (original Japanese title, "The Great World War"), 1961, about a worldwide nuclear war -- sound familiar?! (This is where we came in!) I vaguely remembered seeing it in the late 60s but never since, and it's pretty obscure even by Japanese sci-fi movie standards. I'm going to put a post on that site soon, so maybe you'd want to check it out.

Back to you by next week at the latest, my friend. Have a good weekend if we don't 'speak' before then!

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Sorry to hear that you were not well. I'm glad that you seem to be doing better.

And yes; I look forward to resuming our conversations as well.

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How do you do that mutant smiley face??? I think it's great.

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It's easy: when you reply, put this.....3eyes.....inside a pair of brackets[ ].

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Battle in Outer Space This name rings a bell.
Isn't this the film that was made in 1959 that takes place in 1965? Does the opening of the film depict TV sets in the cars' dashboards?

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Yeah, that's the one, although the opening scene is of an alien attack on an orbiting space station. There is a scene with a TV in a car's dash but that's later. I put a posting about the DVD of this film on its site yesterday.

Have a great weekend!

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The ending was interesting, but the voice over and stock footage weren't really necessary. I mean, I guess they needed to be able to explain that radiation was the reason why the creature's touch was lethal, but the history book opening up to pictures of the Atomic Age gave all of the necessary explanation behind how primative men and women could succeed modern civilization.

I thought that a few of their verbal exchanges were pretty decent, such as the exchange in the cave, but the film really was unsalvagable for the most part. I did appreciate the bathing scene though.

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No, I think the narration was absolutely necessary, not only to fully explain what had happened but to add some poignancy about this last survivor's life story. The ending was kind of sad. The voice over after the old man's narration was a bit anticlimactic but helped drive home the idea that this cycle of events would keep repeating unless we stopped resorting to nuclear wars. Not to mention that in such circumstances there'd be dozens of remakes of this movie as well.

The bathing scene was okay, but nothing compared to the artwork on the film's poster (reproduced on the DVD cover, which can be seen on this site's main page).

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I don't know. I think the part about them turning the book to the pages on the atomic era was actually pretty clever. Following that up with an overlong narration and stock footage kinda detracted from one of the few legitimate moments of the film.

I don't know. Maybe a smaller narration would have worked. I certainly doubt if I'll rewatch the scene again just to play "What I would have done" with it.

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Well, I suppose we should look at it from AIP's perspective:

This was to have played at drive-ins where, instead of watching the movie, randy teenagers would be groping one another and making caveman-like grunts of lust. So, as their 66 minutes wound down, Roger Corman probably felt he had to do something to jolt them into (A) putting their clothes back on and getting ready to drive out of the theater to make room for the next show, and (B) catch them up on the story they'd missed.

Hence, the narration -- to get them moving as well as to Explain It All. That way, they'd get home by 10 PM, be able to tell their parents what the movie was all about, and thereby defray any suspicion that "the kids" were doing anything in the car other than taking in the complexities of the plot.

Meantime, the drive-in and AIP have made their money as well as protected their customer base, so everybody's happy.

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Heh. Fair enough.

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undergone not underwent GN

suzycreamcheese RIP Heath Ledger 1979-2008

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