mark.waltz It's obvious from the start that the actors playing the youthful spear throwing cavemen are far past voting age, and in this clean shaven ancient world that there's a barber shop in one of those caves. It doesn't take much of a look past the posters and lobby cards of this early American International programmer that this will not be a realistic view of the pre-civilized world. Clean cut young "actors" look as if they've just set forth off UCLA's campus, with beards added to the older characters to express the difference between the generations. Seen among the giant dinosaurs, lizards and snakes are a variety of modern mammals, including bears, deer, horses and packs of "wild" dogs that look easily domesticatable. Then, there's the script, overwritten with overly thoughtful philosophies, spoken in amateurish tones that makes this simply just too silly not to ridicule. Even so, there's an element of sweetness to this, and that makes this endearing as a fun bad movie. Future TV star Robert Vaughn is as sincere as he can be. Of the rest of the cast, only Ed Nelson seems to have gone on to other memorable roles. The settings take the prehistoric characters from the obvious sets of Runyeon canyon to the stock footage of the ancient world, some of which oddly look like paintings. Some of the footage becomes painfully slow, although there are unintentional laughs here and there as well. So for me, it becomes a guilty pleasure that I won't soon forget with an epilogue that has to be seen to be believed and must have been added on when they realized that without it, there would be no way the young hunks in this film would be believable as "teenage cave men".

mrb1980 Early Roger Corman movies can be very good ("The Little Shop of Horrors", "Not of This Earth"), very bad ("The Viking Women and the Sea Serpent"), or somewhere in between ("It Conquered the World", Attack of the Crab Monsters"). "Teenage Cave Man" falls somewhere in the middle, with an impoverished budget but a good cast and intelligent story.A restless teenage cave man (Robert Vaughn) has an urge to travel to the forbidden land "beyond the river", where a fabled monster can kill with just a touch. The first journey ends with an unfortunate death (B actor Beach Dickerson) in some quicksand (The "Sucking Sands"), so there's lots of discussion about the status quo, which the tribe elders say must be maintained. Eventually the teenager journeys again to the forbidden land, there's a bear attack (Dickerson in a bear suit), an attack by wild dogs (no doubt liberated from the local pound), and a final confrontation with the dreaded beast. The beast is nothing but an old man in a radiation suit who represents the last survivor of a long-ago nuclear war.Beach Dickerson used to tell hilarious stories about this movie, including a description of his four roles (he dies in three of them, and attends his own funeral). Vaughn adds some credibility to the proceedings, and the luscious Barboura Morris appears in a small part. Okay, it's really cheap, but it's also fun, and Vaughn is pretty good under the circumstances.

Hitchcoc We just lost Robert Vaughan a few weeks ago. He was a great character actor and is best remembered for "The Man from UNCLE." In this one he plays the title character who longs to find out what is beyond the place where the ancestors and the priests have forbidden him and his peers to go. He, of course, is going there. This movie, done by Roger Corman, and marketed strictly to the drive-in set of the fifties, is pretty bad, and I am very patient with the B-movies of this time. Someone mentioned the Twilight Zone and this idea has been used there, but the thing was done on an extremely low budget with most likely single takes over a very short period of time. The only reason to watch it would be to see what Corman was doing at the time. And, of course, to see the young (though not that young) Robert Vaughan.

sol ***SPOILERS*** Roger Corman film about prehistoric man and what obstacles he faced back in prehistoric times and how he eventually overcame them.It took the rebellious and searching for the truth symbol makers-Leslie Bradley-son played by the young and energetic Robert Vaughan to finally find what it's really all about in what's beyond the great river where the monster who kills with one touch rules. Denied to go beyond the great river by caveman leader the black bearded one, Frank DeKova, the intuitive son of the symbol maker together with his fellow teenage cavemen travel there anyway with one of the the cave people the blond boy who can't float, Beach Dickerson, ending up dead by drowning in a nearby stream. It's the black-bearded one who then demands that the son of the symbol maker be put to death from not only breaking the law of the cave clan but being responsible for the blond boy's tragic death! After his dad, the symbol man, convinced the black-bearded one to give his son a second chance he despite risking his life for a second time goes beyond the land of the great river to find out what all these BS stories about the monster who kills with one touch is all about. It's when the son of the symbol maker finally confronts the monster that he realizes that he's in fact not trying to kill anyone but warn him and his fellow cavemen about what really happened way back then, in pre prehistoric times, and not let it happen again!***SPOILERS*** It was in fact the black-bearded one who in the end took out the monster who kills with one touch, by cracking his skull open with a boulder, which totally destroyed his made up stories about the monster being and indestructible God. It also had an outraged son of the symbol maker do in the black-bearded one with a arrow to the chest in him keeping the monster from telling the truth about what happened way back then and what exactly he had to do with it. Fortunately for the cave dwelling clan the dying monster had a book that exists thousand of years before man developed a written language and printing press to explain what really happened and why the world is in the sorry shape that it's in today in what seems like the year one million years B.C. But don't expect the cave people to be able to understand what the book is telling them since they, in not being able to read English or an other language, have no idea what's written in it!