Teenage Caveman
Director: Larry Clark
Columbia Tristar Home Video 2002
"God is Coming and he is pissed." So chants a small, hypnotic crowd of hardly-believable modern cavepeople.
The opening five minutes brings a dump-truck of ‘90s Up All Night apocalyptic garbage into your den. The sleeeze of Kids wizard Larry Clark has washed Gilbert Gottfried out for the wolves.
And this F-movie is a similar study to Kids’ adolescence-gone-drug-fueled mutant agenda, except the title is Teenage Caveman, the non-acting is strong enough to suck your brain into the tube, there’s shadow-less CGI, and cruddy monster make-up, and nauseating time lapses.
There’s also self awareness: "Look at You! You're like a bad B-movie."
After watching TC a couple times, the movie is great in a couple ways. Music-to-noise transitions are cool, because they enhance the nervous-wreck-to-psycho gauges of some characters. The time stretches at odd moments and is unsettling to watch. The dialogue is bizarre; where do they say "looner" in the U.S.? It sounds like a term in Northern Florida that I've never stumbled upon. A couple scenes like that come up now and then. Maybe it’s west-coast?
Clark seems to be creating a benchmark for body language and play. But, even with so many minutes of touching on drugs, this is a flagrant use of money that the producers (almost 20) had to blow (specifically the hot body explosion scenes, pulsating organs and all, even though they should have blown up too).
Even though I’m the biggest supporter of B-grade movies, I think Clark should have made a couple more before exploring and exploding into the world of cheese.
-Sticky Rice
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