Tuesday, March 6, 2012

MST3K: Episode 315 - Teenage Cave Man


Episode 315: Teenage Cave Man

First aired: Comedy Central on 9 November 1991
Availability: MST3KVideos.com

Insert Baba O'Reilly reference here
Though this episode has a production number before Episode 316: Gamera vs Zigra, this one contains a reference to a line from that episode. This one did air after that episode, so that makes sense.

On the other hand, Episode 317: The Saga of the Viking Women and their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent, which also aired before this episode, contains multiple references to this movie.

All this indicates that 316 should come before 315, but 317 should come after 315. However, I'm going through the episodes in air date order, so it's 316, 317, 315. Got it?

Now that we have that all sorted out, let's see what we went through all that to get.

Battle of the Stock Footage
Oh. It's a Roger Corman film. Sort of makes it all not worth keeping up with, doesn't it? Oh, well. That's how it goes.

Being a Corman film, it's a short flick. This one needed not one, but two shorts to pad it out to a full episode of MST3K. Not that I'm complaining. I'm not sure if we could have put up with another 20 minutes of this masterpiece.

One short was about water skiing at Cypress Gardens. It was fun to see, even without the riffing, but with the riffing, was even more fun. I went to Cypress Gardens once. It's not there anymore. They put up a Legoland or something in its place last year. Which sounds like it should get the short treatment all over again.
Teaching girls to skiThe 2nd short was un-bear-able
The second short, was not so much fun. It was Florida-based, too, about an adventurer who traps animals for a living. I didn't enjoy the short so much, and I got the feeling J&tB didn't, either.

I never saw this episode during any of the ten times it aired on Comedy Central. I feel so deprived. Wait. "Deprived" isn't the word I'm looking for. "Lucky." Yeah, "lucky" is the word I meant.

Mankind done blowed hisself up!
A 25-year-old Robert Vaughn plays the Teenage Cave Man in the movie. He looks older.

It's about a bunch of cave men (and women) who mope around in a miserable existence until one rebellious teen, played by Napoleon Solo, decides to go over the river and through the woods to see what he could see. He's shunned for his violation of Cave Man Law, but all is forgiven when he turns 18 or 26 or something. He gets him a woman, then goes off on another trek. He meets the last man from Before the War, who dies. He goes back to his cave, but the narrator wonders how many times mankind will build a civilization, bomb itself back to the Stone Age, and repeat the cycle before they finally just get it over with and kill everybody. The end.

Not a great episode, but an okay one. The second short sort of slowed it down for me, and the movie never picked it back up. Despite the good riffing, the bad movie kept it from being a great episode. Yes, the movie was that bad.

Think about it. Scary Creature is just a guy in the woods dressed up in a disguise. Woods those in the community aren't supposed to enter. It's not the year we think it is. No, this wasn't a good movie. And it wasn't any better when M. Night Shyamalan remade it as The Village.

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