Caveman

Release Year: 1981

Director: Carl Gottlieb

Review: The 80's were a strange time, with movies to match.  What do you get when you mix Dennis Quaid, Ringo Starr, prehistoric man and terrible claymation dinosaurs?  'Caveman' apparently.  There is no talking in this film.  Well at least not in English.  Instead we get grunts and groans of the caveman.  Ringo's character is the weak link in his clan, always getting ostracized and picked on.  And of course he is in love of the clan leader's girl.  He eventually gets booted (literally) from the clan, and he and Quaid's character accidently discover walking upright.  This somehow makes them more adept and they form a clan of misfit cavemen who start learning all the tricks of modern man, and hope to win the heart of the girl of the rival clan.

This is a terrible movie.  Just awful.  I understand the film has a cult following for being 'so bad it's good'.  For the first quarter of the movie I thought this would be the case for me as well.  I couldn't help but laugh at the sheer awfulness that was unfolding before me.  This goes stale however, and we're left with just a terrible film. Sure, its fun to watch Quaid and Starr bound around like idiots, but ultimately it just gets old.  The film felt a lot like 'Year One', which also had its share of problems.  Only this was far dumber, if that's even possible.  Of course it has some value at being laughed at (note: not with), but this is best done watching a few scenes.  Actually sitting down and watching the entire thing is really a waste of time.
Rating: 2/5



On Golden Pond

Release Year: 1981
Review: A quiet story about an elderly retired professor and his wife whose relaxing summer at their lake house is interrupted by an unexpected stay of a precocious young teen. This was Henry Fonda's last role and he won an Oscar for it along with Katharine Hepburn. Henry Fonda plays an old curmudgeon perfectly, managing to be just witty enough in his ill-tempered jabs to be charming in his own respect. I can't say the same for Hepburn's character whose overly dramatic, verbose and batty was more irritating than endearing.

It took awhile for the film to grow onto me. At first the obsessing about death and the old bickering couple was draining. Listening about old people moan about being old is a bit of a bore. When the boy is introduced into the story things started to look up a bit more. Instead of being a melancholy tale of dying, it became a tender story about a grumpy old man warming to a rambunctious youth. While it was heartwarming, there was very little to the story. There was never much tension between the boy and the family. There was only one brief scene where there was any friction whatsoever. There was a secondary plot of a strife in the relationship between the elderly Fonda and his screen daughter (Jane Fonda), but this was not fleshed out at all and she was hardly in the movie. Before any real friction was ever shown, they had wrapped up that relationship in a nice convenient package. The entire film had a very "Lifetime movie of the week" feel to it, complete with an overly melodramatic score and needlessly long shots of nature. It was a pleasant film on aging and relationships, but it lacked any real meat and didn't push any emotional buttons.
Rating: 3/5

Mommie Dearest

Release Year: 1981
Review: For the most part I did not enjoy this film. It felt much longer then it was, with the plot and dialog fairly dull and uninteresting. The one redeeming quality and the only high points in the film were Faye Dunaway's brilliant tirades that were truly terrifying.
Rating: 3/5