‘Caveman’ or — The Biggest Build-up in the History of Cinema?

The memory is both clear and eternal.

I was eleven years old when I saw the trailer for ‘Caveman’ (1981) and immediately there was no movie on Earth I was more desperate to see. Why? Because it had stop-motion dinosaurs in it, that’s why. There were only two big problems. Firstly, there wasn’t a cinema near where I lived that was showing it. Secondly, stop-motion dinosaurs aside, the film looked bloody unwatchable. A fur-clad Ringo Starr accidentally dropping a dinosaur egg into an active volcano where it immediately gets fried? Not exactly ‘Annie Hall’ (1977), is it? (I should point out I was a somewhat pretentious eleven year old)

Still, they say that on your deathbed you regret the things you didn’t do as opposed to the things you did so there was no way I was going to risk my final thoughts on this planet being “Why didn’t I watch ‘Caveman’?!” So when the opportunity presented itself to me last night to finally see it I knew I had to seize the chance in order to shuffle off this mortal coil free from any binding ties to this physical existence. Besides, what better way to enjoy an obviously awful Ringo Starr movie than to build it up in your head over the course of almost half a century?

So just how bad is it? Well, it turns out that ‘Caveman’ was nowhere near as terrible as I was expecting/dreading it to be. In fact, I’d go so far as to say it’s decidedly non-shit.

The first surprises come during the opening credits. Music by Lalo Schifrin? Effects by Jim Danforth and Randy Cook? Cinematography by Alan Hume? Written and directed by Carl Gottlieb? There’s real talent here!

Also, far from being nothing more than a cheap Ringo Starr vanity project (something I always assumed it to be) it’s actually a somewhat charming and fun love letter to prehistoric monster movies and the work of Ray Harryhausen, so if you’re a fan of that type of thing, which I most certainly am, then ‘Caveman’ borders on (and sometimes crosses over fully into) the realm of the delightful.

For example — there’s a recurring gag where a lone dinosaur crows like a rooster at dusk and morning, and the way the roaring creature is silhouetted against a mysterious prehistoric sky was as evocative as anything in ‘Jurassic Park’ (1993). I’m not kidding — it’s adorable!

Sure, the dinosaurs are completely goofy, but it’s a goofy movie! And that goofiness gives the animators a lot of scope for injecting loads of personality. There’s a great moment when a dinosaur is fed a tonne of cannabis resulting in it staggering about until it falls off a cliff… and it’s one of the best dinosaurs-falling-off-a-cliff sequences I’ve seen.

But let’s not get carried away as this is still a very stupid, puerile and infantile comedy and one I’m amazed the studio even allowed to get made (who the hell thought this would ever make any money?!). The lack of dialogue means it functions purely through slapstick and silent humour yet its brief running time means it JUST about gets away with it before completely exhausting itself, although there’s still plenty of jokes here that’ll make you wince and flinch in pain.

So yeah, ‘Caveman’ is nowhere near as appalling as I was expecting which isn’t too bad for a film that, quite frankly, should never ha