May 1985 continues with Mario Van Peebles rapping, Tom Berenger singing, and a teenage cavegirl

This is a seriously weird weekend of movies

This is not a good weekend of movies.

As with many of these ‘80s weekends, this one is surprisingly packed with new releases. Some of these were on a handful of major market screens. Some of these were carpet-bombed as widely as possible. The thing that strikes me most about this particular fistful of movies is how low the bar for theatrical release seemed to be. There is some no-budget dreck here, right up against big studio releases, and this isn’t some dumping ground weekend. This is May, the beginning of what had already transformed into the most lucrative real estate for the studios all year long.

Home video was, by this point, a major force and only growing bigger every year. There were definitely movies that were being produced for the express purpose of taking advantage of the home video market. But for those movies, the best advertisement they could possibly have was a theatrical release, no matter how brief. There started to be more and more movies released every weekend, and that meant that there needed to be more screens, and that meant more multiplexes.

Living in Chattanooga, there were originally about ten screens that my parents were willing to drive to, but by the time May of 1985 rolled around, that number had more than doubled. The multiplex as we know them today really only started becoming commonplace during this movie boom of the ‘80s, and when you’d go to one of these theaters and stand there looking at eight or ten different screens of random ‘80s insanity, it was a wild time. The ‘70s may have had some of the best movies ever made, but you didn’t have as many screens or as many ways to see things. In the ‘80s, it felt like you could drown in movies if you wanted to.

And, believe me, I did.

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MAY 10

Cavegirl
Daniel Roebuck, Cynthia Thompson, Darren Young, Saba Moor-Doucette, Jeff Chayette, Charles Mitchell, Cynthia Rullo, Tom Hamil, Bill Adams, Chris Noble, Bill Sehres, Sydni King, Stacey Swain, A.A. Cavallaro, Maggie Ostroff, Lawrence Gabriel Jr., Valerie Greybe, David Castro, Bob Verne, Kent H. Jorgensen, Robert Field, Jerry Day, Craig S. Leary, Ken Willingham, Shane Kelly, Jennifer Keel, Tim Berry, Nathaniel Bratton, Debbie Wright, Olivia De Anda, Paul Enns, Kathy Mehling, Bonita Samek, David Alvedrez, Barry Hibbard, Michelle Bauer, Jasae, Pamela Powers, Susie Lynch, Susanne Mierisch
cinematography by David Oliver
music by Jon St. James
screenplay by David Oliver
based on the screenplay Primal Urge by Phil Groves
produced by David Oliver
directed by David Oliver
Rated R
1 hr 25 mins

SYNOPSIS

The early ‘80s saw the release of several different caveman movies. Both Quest for Fire and Iceman treated the subject matter seriously, to varying degrees of success, while the Ringo Starr vehicle Caveman is one of the silliest movies of the entire decade. I say “one of” because David Oliver’s juvenile Cavegirl gives it a run for its money, and as cheap as that film is, Cavegirl makes it look like Jurassic Park by comparison.

image courtesy of Crown International Pictures

The film opens with Daniel Roebuck playing one of the smarmiest nerds of the ‘80s, and that’s a pretty long list. There’s a lot of this material before the field trip where Rex discovers the mysterious crystal that opens a time portal, trapping him in the distant past. There’s nothing to the plot after that. He meets a group of cavemen. One of them, Eba (Cindy Ann Thompson) is an adorable blonde beach bunny, while the rest of them are cartoonishly dirty, and Rex starts trying to figure out how to get Eba to have sex with him. There are endless variations on scenes where Rex tries to get Eba to say “Would you like to sit on my face?” but then something interrupts them. Hilarious, right? If you said no, then I’ve got terrible news for you. That’s all there is. Over and over and over. Dan Roebuck is a solid character actor, and we’ll talk about some of his very good work later in the decade, but he’s saddled with an unplayable character here. Rex is a creep, pure and simple. Thompson only made a handful of movies, and she’s enormously winning. Again, there’s nothing on the page for her to do, but she manages to make Eba into a sweet and charming presence. David Oliver made a grand total of one movie, and I think that’s probably one too many. This is juvenile in an embarrassing way, and even in a decade of brainlessly horny exploitation films, this feels cheap and shoddy. It’s too tame for people just watching for T&A, and too stupid for anyone else.