Caveman (1981) 92m
An engaging, low-budget flick (how much money do you need to make a caveman film anyway?) shot in Mexico by director Carl Gottlieb. It was one of Ringo Starr's more appealing roles - aside from interesting projects like THE MAGIC CHRISTIAN and THAT'LL BE THE DAY he made weird cameos in films like 200 MOTELS and LISZTOMANIA. In CAVEMAN, Ringo's doleful expression and shambling posture win us over from the start (I'm sure many a critic remarked at the time that the ex-Beatle's best acting performance to date didn't require him to speak). Even though there is no dialogue in the film we learn that he is Atouk, a member of a tribe ruled by the burly, formidable Tonda (Oaklands Raider pro John Matuszak). Dissatisfied with life in the tribe - and frustrated by his desire for Tonda's mate Lana (Barbara Bach, looking very sexy in furs) - he sets off on his own and gradually meets other loners. Together they form their own tribe of outsiders. Traditionally, in most 'serious' movies of this genre, a supposed misfit is ejected from the tribe and is eventually adopted into a more enlightened tribal society. Here it's the opposite - Ringo's group is a proud mixture of minorities. Yet it's they who discover fire, music and the world's largest poached egg, while the more traditional/conformist group gets nowhere. By no means are you expected to draw any serious subtexts from these scenes - the group's accidental discoveries are played for laughs, though do get a little predictable after a while. One of my favorite moments occurs when Ringo and friend Dennis Quaid simultaneously 'learn' to walk erect and then immediately shrug off thoughts of returning to their less evolved former tribe leader.
Unfortunately, CAVEMAN resorts to physical comedy for its final act (the story starts taking weird turns when Quaid's character disappears down a river), and its lazy incorporation of classical tunes into the soundtrack is a little irritating, but it's still one of the more watchable cave-people movies. Animator David Allen, whose creatures are generally better than the low-budget films they appear in, creates some comic dinosaurs that look as good as any found in major studio pictures of the time. The simple vocabulary invented for the film consists of character names and a few verbs and nouns - you'll easily pick up the words for love, fire, monster, and others. In one of the film's funniest elements, Evan Kim plays an Asian who cannot communicate with the other tribe members because of a language barrier - guess which language he speaks! It's a good film for a group of young children to watch (one word may need to be bleeped) because its wordless presentation is bound to get them explaining the subtleties of the storyline to each other. It's also fun for older viewers to see the pre-Hollywood lives of some of the cast being duplicated on screen: former model Bach strikes a number of alluring poses on her bed, football player Matuszak finds himself on the receiving end of a dogpile, and drummer Ringo gets to join in an improv session around his tribe's newly-invented campfire. He would go on to marry Bach shortly after production wrapped on the movie. You won't have to watch it for too long to see why!
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