TEENAGE CAVEMAN
US, 2002, 90 minutes, Colour.
Andrew Keegan, Tara Subkoff, Richard Hillman, Tiffany Lemos, Paul Hip.
Directed by Larry Clark.
There is no real reason for seeing Teenage Caveman except that it is a film from photographer Larry Clark. Clark moved into film-making in the mid-90s with the controversial Kids, showing life in the New York streets amongst teenagers, surprising audiences with these views on drug-taking and sexual experience. He then went on to make a more mainstream film, Another Day in Paradise, with Melanie Griffith and James Woods. However, he returned to teenage themes with Bully and with Teenage Caveman. His next film, with some of the actors from Teenage Caveman, was the very sexually explicit Ken Park, again showing sexual behaviour amongst teenagers in California.
In the 1990s, a number of B-budget films of the 1950s were remade and updated. Teenage Caveman is one of them. The original was directed by Roger Corman in 1958 with Robert Vaughn as the star, a story of a prehistoric tribe who ventured outside its boundaries only to find that the story was a post-apocalyptic one where the teenagers discovered past culture. The plot is taken almost entirely for this film except that when the teenagers emerge from a very severe and puritanically strict society of the future, warned against the aberrations of the past, they encounter two young people who have been scientific experiments, enabled to live forever, who then show them the ways of drugs and sexuality and corruption.
The film is particularly prurient in its presentation of sexuality and the interactions. The acting is not very accomplished. However, Clark as a photographer knows how to take advantage of his set-ups and scenarios.
The film shows the decadence of attitudes about society, freedom. However, as with most American films, there is repentance at the end and a happy repentant ending. (A film which was somewhat similar in theme was John Waters’ A Dirty Shame where, at the end, there was no redemption, only indulgence.)
