Fleasy dissident The Stone Age is wild and harsh. The one you didn't eat today will eat you tomorrow. He who is strong is right. The cream goes to the mean and insolent. The most beautiful chicks are always with those who treat them a little more tenderly than a piece of stone. No one needs smart and talented people. The crowd is always on the side of the one who yells louder. The closer the happiness, the worse it is seen. That's how cruel he is, this stone age! It's not really a stone, but, God forbid, the 21st!
Filmmakers have repeatedly addressed the topic of prehistoric life and will continue to address it. And going to the movie "Alpha" - a confirmation of that. Someone, transferring to thousands of years ago, is looking for the beauty of virgin nature and “naked” feelings of a person untouched by the vices of civilization, someone is looking for in that era that, both then and now, is rare – resourcefulness, intelligence, courage, courage, honor, friendship, love, kindness; someone easier through the prism of time to show purified from husk relations between man and man and nature, someone wants to restore and study the era with scientific meticulity, and someone – to shine with special effects and other audiovisual. Prehistoric comedies stand out.
Oddly enough, the range of comedies on this topic is very wide: from frankly parody, using absurd humor in the style of “Monty Python” “World History” and “A Million Years BCE” to the family comic-sentimental “Ice Age”, “The Croods Family” and “Wild Ancestors”, from vulgar-pun intended “Beginnings of Times” and “Misssing Link” to mixing with numerous anachronisms Stonepunk “Flinstones”
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“Caveman” is no worse or better than the others, a rather amusing attempt to rethink the beginning of the era of first discoveries as the forced necessity of rebellion against the brute force of a handful of failed renegades expelled from the “official” tribe of as yet unerect people. I must say, the film largely repeats the much more inventive animated film “The Missing Link”, released a year earlier, and, unfortunately, is not able to shine with the parody findings and wit of “World History” by Mel Brooks, released almost simultaneously with this picture, despite the fact that the screenwriter of “Caveman” was a permanent co-writer of Brooks Rudy De Luc, for some reason, but did not work on “History”. The director was the debutant in the big movie Carl Gottlieb, screenwriter, among other things, Spielberg’s “Jaws” and director of the Oscar-nominated short “The Scattered Waiter” with Steve Martin. Although the script and directing here just from the sky are missing stars. It seems that De Luca pulls a full meter sketch shot by Brooks for “World History”, and Gottlieb exhausted already in the first half hour, and often loses the temporite, a thing for comedy is very important.
However, the film remains a funny and very entertaining trinket, where it is interesting not so much what as how. Quite amusing deliberately naive detail of the Stone Age and created with the help of frame-by-frame animation, the cute dynasaurians, such as if the film was shot in the era of the classic “Lost World” or at least “A Million years BC”, and not in the 80s, when released in December of the same 81st year and filmed about the same era (only very seriously) the film “Battle for Fire” amazes with the realism of makeup and special effects. Most likely, everything looks like this not because of the intention to parody the classics, but because of the terrible economy, but, as they say, they killed two birds with one stone at a time - undressing the heroines in a bikini Rackel Welch, and making monsters laughably plasticine, the authors made a competent curtsey towards films that grew up several generations.
Even more amusing is the sending of the tape, disguised as a prehistoric comedy and a love story, and the history of the formation of the first “homo sapiens”, and almost the history of the world’s first dissident! The main character, physically weak, but quickly adapting, intelligent and inventive Atuk with a suspiciously Jewish nose Ringo Starr and eyebrows of a house, gathers around him a crowd of motley losers - gays, blacks, Asians, a blind old man, a lame and even a dwarf, and with this gang comes up with the first weapon, the first armor, lights the first fire, fries the first chicken, rids the world of a tyrannosaurus (probly the latter), tames a giant lizard, a lame, and a great understanding of what it is - a rude love. This can be regarded simply as an accident, or - given the nationality of the writer and director - as a funny story of Jewry!
You can’t say that all jokes shoot. Sometimes authors change their sense of taste, and sometimes humor. Sometimes you laugh not so much at a joke as at its absurdity. But the atmosphere of universal good-natured comic turmoil, a kind of “national mockingbird”, the film does not lose. In addition, there are very successful reprise, so, in the film they speak Tarabar “prehistoric” language, and the only one who speaks English is a Chinese, but no one understands it!
Ringo Starr did not show any acting heights, however, they were not required of him. But he very sincerely languidly looked at the beauty Barbara Bach, unlike his hero, still preferring her to Shelly Long. Very comical was Dennis Quaid in the role of the best friend of the protagonist, and absolutely in place was the giant John Matuschak. And Lalo Chifrin does not hesitate to borrow both classical music and soundtracks from “Space Odyssey” and even “the gendarme of Saint-Tropez”.
In “Caveman” Gottlieb reached his directorial peak – he did nothing (except for the brilliant “Scatter waiter”, laconic and witty, however, I suspect the merit of the same Steve Martin, and “Amazon on the Moon” though they were quite funny, the box office was inferior to “Cave” by an order of magnitude!) more successful. Of course, he didn’t become a great film artist, and Caveman is not a masterpiece at all. This is sometimes stupid and ridiculous, and in places - unexpectedly thin and funny trifle, rough, clumsy, but somehow damn charming!
7 out of 10