Caveman (1981) Movie Review
Ringo Starr, Dennis Quaid, Shelley Long, and Barbara Bach feature in Carl Gottlieb's 1981 slapstick comedy Caveman, which was written and directed by him.
Living in "One Zillion BC - October 9th" is Atouk (Ringo Starr), a tormented and undersized caveman. He has a fetish for the attractive but shallow Lana (Barbara Bach), who is the partner of Tonda (John Matuszak), the physically intimidating bully and brutal initiator of their tribe.
Atouk joins a group of misfits after being exiled with his pal Lar (Dennis Quaid), along with the attractive Tala (Shelley Long) and the old blind man Gog (Jack Gilford). The party often runs across ravenous dinosaurs while also saving Lar from a "nearby ice age" when they come into an evil snowman. They learn how to completely upright walk throughout their journeys, find sedative medications and fire, create food, music, and weaponry.
With the help of these developments, Atouk leads an assault on Tonda, toppling him and taking over as the tribe's new leader. He chooses Tala as his mate instead of Lana, and the two of them live happily ever after.
a joint international production between Mexico and the United States. The Sierra de rganos National Park in the Mexican state of Zacatecas, specifically the hamlet of Sombrerete, served as the primary location for filming.
While part of the sequences were shot in the Churubusco Studios in Mexico City, the river and fishing lake scene was filmed in the Mexican state of Durango. The movie includes stop-motion animated dinosaurs created by Jim Danforth, featuring a Tyrannosaurus Rex that is animated by Randall W. Cook and gets inebriated by a cannabis-like substance in one scene. Despite playing a significant role in the special effects scenes, Danforth abandoned the movie "about two-thirds of the way" (in his words) because the Directors Guild of America forbade him from using his contractual on-screen credit—co-direction with Carl Gottlieb—on the finished product. As a result, Danforth's name is absent from the movie.
The dialogue in the movie is nearly exclusively spoken in "caveman" dialect.
The audience at certain performances received a translation booklet for 30 "caveman words." Evan Kim plays a caveman who speaks current English, but none of the other characters can understand him, and the only English dialogue utilized in the film is for comedy effect. Being a Korean caveman, he gives the impression of being more sophisticated than the others by speaking English. Long said she could not speak English at her audition, yet she grunted in response to every question.
On the set of Caveman, Barbara Bach and Ringo Starr initially became friends before getting married a little over a year later.
MGM Home Entertainment released the movie on Region 1 DVD on June 4, 2002. Then, on February 17, 2015, Olive Films released it on Blu-ray Disc.
The movie has a 35% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 20 critics' reviews, with an average score of 4.7/10. The movie has a Metacritic score of 55%, which indicates "mixed or average reviews" and is based on the opinions of 7 reviewers.
The movie received a 1.5 out of 4 star rating from Roger Ebert. He said the ensemble was "interesting," but Caveman's biggest flaw was that it was a parody with "no mainstream original material for it to satirize." There has never been a truly popular film set in the Paleolithic era.
Ebert and Gene Siskel both gave the movie a scathing "don't see it" rating on their TV program, although they were considerably more forgiving when they mentioned how funny the dinosaur-related moments were.
The actual star of the movie, according to Janet Maslin of The New York Times, was the special-effects dinosaur. She called the movie "dopey, but it's also lots of fun." It received a favorable review from Pauline Kael of The New Yorker, who called it "a funky, buoyant farce."
The Washington Post's Gary Arnold gave it a mixed review. Although he criticized it for its lack of innovation, he recommends that younger audiences who have never seen it before could find it enjoyable. Arnold compares the movie unfavorably to The Three Ages, where Buster Keaton was able to apply his brilliance to the role. By contrast, director Gottlieb fails to make use of other outstanding performers like Quaid, Schreiber, or Gilford, and Caveman struggles to overcome Starr's limitations.
It’s definitely no Jurassic Park, or even Jurassic World: Dominion for that matter.