The most remarkable thing about Roger Corman’s Teenage Caveman, which was released in 1958, is that it stars a very young Robert Vaughn as the titular character. Everyone has to start somewhere, no matter the profession, and while this would not be Vaughn’s first acting role, it would feature him in one of his first big screen parts, where he would take the lead.

Unlike Vaughn’s appearance, the story is unremarkable though not so bad to be unwatchable. It almost seemed as if it could have been pulled from a comic book, Tor or Anthro but two that come to mind when watching this film. It is simple fare and while that might not be enough for some, it is good enough for others. Perhaps for those young teens who would end up seeing it at the drive-in when first distributed, kids who were not there to see high art or for those science-fiction enthusiasts who simply want to pass the time with something that does not require any deep thinking. There is fun to be had here and Vaughn helps to make it as such with his performance though to be fair, he had little to work with. It is said that Vaughn hated this picture and one can see why as it did little to advance his career. Corman also stated that the film could have been better than it was but truth be told, it turned out to be fairly enjoyable if one gave it an honest chance.

All of this occurs in a post-apocalyptic world where a group of cavemen and women live in a fairly barren land. They could go across the river where game is plentiful, a place where danger is rife or at least unknown yet the rules and the law by which they live forbid it. The young man as played by Vaughn does not understand why his people do not venture out. He knows of the rules but they are old and surely, they cannot pertain to the time in which they live now. Across the river, he goes, not once but twice and it is there that he discovers many wondrous things and by the end of the movie when the tribe is hunting him down before he can bring the fabled evil back with him their stories have told of, they too realize that things are not as they might seem.

Things might have worked out better if Corman and company had played up the science-fiction aspects just a bit more or at the very least, made it clear that this was in fact a post-apocalyptic world from the outset. That fact was never made apparent until the final act when the ‘evil one’ was killed and the tail-end of the film was given a voiceover blurb telling the audience what used to be before the current state of things. There were a few giant creatures and some rabid dogs to be had, the former being slightly shoddy in nature but par for the course given the picture’s budget and director and overall, were not as bad as one might think as they were merely in the background for the most part. Things could have been better overall but Teenage Caveman did what it set out to do and that was to entertain. Mission accomplished.

3 out of 5