Alley-Oof!
By RICHARD CORLISS
CAVEMAN
Directed by Carl Gottlieb Screenplay by Rudy DeLuca and Carl Gottlieb
For dozens of young Hollywood moviemakers, happiness is being paid to mount elaborate tributes to the guilty pleasures of their youth. Horror comic books, low-budget melodramas, early rock 'n' roll--the trinity of '50s trash --have received the pop-cultural imprimatur from canny directors and writers who see their task as dynamiting the citadel of middle-class tastefulness. Energy is the password, anarchy the politics.
These are the movies your parents warned you to avoid. Now they are the movies keeping the New Hollywood alive.
The sight of Carole Landis and Victor Mature grunting lustfully through One Million B.C. was enough to satisfy 1940 preteens; the vision of Raquel Welch in One Million Years B.C. engorged many a Saturday-matinee libido 26 years later.
Why not camp it up this time, with Ringo Starr as a misfit caveman and sultry Barbara Bach as his Stone Age Circe? Why not, indeed? Writers Gottlieb and DeLuca have risen--no, lowered themselves--to the challenge. Instead of screaming at prehistoric monsters, the audience squeams at a ragtag parade of sight gags and slapstick. And has a wonderful time.
Caveman has been assembled with the :are that would normally be lavished on a Big Mac during the lunchtime rush. The dialogue (in a pre-Tarzan patois) rarely gets more sophisticated than "Aieee! Kuda! Ma pooka ma bobo aloonda zug-zug fech macha!"* But Ringo is splendid leading his tribe in man's first jam session, and the rest of the cast is fully up to the demands of the script. Kudos to Richard Moll as an Abominable Snowman who shambles around like Groucho Marx in sopping-wet fake fur, and to an animated Tyrannosaurus rex who deserves next ear's Oscar for Best Supporting Thing, ^ow how about a remake of Bedtime for Bonzo? --By Richard Corliss
* Help! Come here! I hurt my friend while making love with an ugly beast!
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