Seeing "The Future"
It's hard to keep your thinking cap on when you're watching
Teenage Caveman, directed by the notorious Larry Clark,
the photographer/director whose movie Kids incited many
parents and critics to proclaim that the line between cinema and
exploitation had been crossed. Drawing as much acclaim as
condemnation, Kids offered a sobering stare at an urban
wasteland where teens indulged in dangerous sex, substance
abuse, and rampant violence.
It's good to see that nothing -- other than the amounts of gore
and tongue-in-cheek overacting -- has changed on Clark's watch.
Teenage Caveman is one of several releases from Creature
Features -- a Southern California Distribution/production house
run by former AIP head Samuel Z. Arkoff's son Lou, monster-maker
Stan Winston, and actress Colleen Camp -- that are remaking or
updating the schlock horror films of postwar America with
able-bodied adolescents from the latest issues of Teen
Beat.
This 2001 cable TV version of Roger Corman's 1958 snoozer --
itself duly skewered by Mystery Science Theater -- is not
your run-of-the-mill intertextual update, interested in
interrogating the aspects of the original's sociological
origins: think Troma's Toxic Avenger or Full Moon's
Puppetmaster with naked teenagers and you're there.
Corman's film seized upon a post-apocalyptic future
characterized by the kind of hysteria that preoccupied many SF
films of the period as pretext for his caveboy's (Robert
Vaughan) coming-of-age metamorphosis. Clark's movie uses the
same plot to demonstrate yet again, the inefficacy and duplicity
of adults. Sure enough, by the film's 30-minute mark, the only
grown-ups with speaking roles have been killed off by the, ahem,
kids.
The titular caveman, David (Andrew Keegan, the narcissistic
pretty boy from 10 Things I Hate About You), kills his
father, a self-elected messiah of the clan (think: Jim Jones or
David Koresh), after pop tries to rape his son's sweetheart,
Sarah (the too skinny Tara Subkoff), having picked her to be his
disciple, or something. In a particularly Clarkish moment (even
if he didn't write this thing, his prints are all over it),
David kills dad with a small metal crucifix through the eye.
After the clan finds out about this blasphemy, David is strung
up like Christ to a tree outside the cave to rot, or better,
serves as target for little kids bearing rocks.
He's eventually saved from this fate by his faithful friends, a
group of multi-racial, gorgeous kids he's been teaching to read
using Penthouse magazines as educational materials. The
Kerouac-reading David leads his group -- "The Future," he calls
them -- into the wild, looking for another home.
Faster than you can say Kids, Clark's handheld camera
goes into action and the script, whatever there is of it, seems
to go out the window. Spending what feels like five minutes of
screen time, Clark just lets his kids loose into the woods like
he did into the NYC streets in Kids, recording whatever they
have to say. I heard someone say, "I'm tired of walking!" at
least twice (whatever you say about Teenage Caveman, you can't
say that it isn't funny). Most of what they ramble on about
isn't even synched with the shots. It almost looks like a
fashion commercial featuring the rambunctious, rag-tag teen
fleet in rags.
Then, it gets sillier. The kids come upon a post-apocalyptic
version of Seattle, but are summarily forced into a cave because
of a nuclear-winter-type storm that descends upon both them and
the screen. Cut to Clark's bread and butter: shots of all of
them lying about a super-cool urban penthouse in nothing but
their underwear and some cool-as-shit poses, and you have your
cinematic left field moment. The camera lingers on their lithe
young bodies long enough to clue you into what Teenage
Caveman is really all about (teen sex), before introducing
the villain, a coked-out, fashion-victim stoner named Neil
(Richard Hillman).
The rest is run-of-the-mill exploitation fun: by living the high
life in the penthouse and having sexual intercourse with Neil
and his hyper-sexualized girlfriend, Judith (a mostly naked
Tiffany Limos), the cavekids are suckered into becoming
receptacles for the former party-hearty couple's modified
superhuman genes, which will eventually allow them to engender
another human race. Problem is, without a serum, the kids
literally explode. As you can guess, everyone blows up, except
David and Sarah, who spend most of the movie talking about why
they're "just not ready" to hump yet.
Before they blow up, though, the film offers lots of sex and
drugs. In one seemingly unscripted section, Clark just lets his
kids loose in a 10-minute segment where everyone except David
and Sarah frolic, coke up, have sex, overact, look confused,
cackle, drink, and deflate every erotic moment they initiate (it
may not sound like a long time, but sitting through it, you'll
realize just how long an onscreen minute can be).
This is easily one of the strangest scenes I've ever seen,
because it doesn't look like it belongs in the film. It's as if
Clark took Kids' finest and final scene, the apartment
party, and grafted it onto Teenage Caveman without the
journalistic "distance" for which he's sometimes reviled.
There's nothing to hold on to here but images, and even then,
it's slippery. There's an obvious, if tawdry, fulfillment in
watching the teen cavekids get their rocks off after being
hounded by David's dead dad/messiah into repressing their sexual
urges. But when one of them explodes, almost 15 minutes after
the sex scene, the dots are only vaguely connected.
Which is cool, because Teenage Caveman is a comparatively
low budget horror flick you rent for those Friday nights when
you're chilling with your friends and in the mood for guilty
pleasures, something that can make all of you laugh your asses
off while satisfying that urge for gratuitous gore. Creature
Features isn't in the biz to produce Saving Private Ryan,
after all. So, just grab some popcorn, kick back, and laugh as
you watch the naked kids try on cool clothes, bone each other,
and then explode in a mess of crimson and flesh.
— 27 June 2002
