B-movie producers Crown International Pictures seemed to churn out a lot of comedies in the 80's. The majority of them, I have discovered to my cost, are decidedly under par. Like most, Cave Girl has a title and cover that suggests it might be decent fun at the very least but in practice this is yet another laugh-free zone from good old Crown. It tells the story of a nerdy anthropology student called Rex who touches a coloured rock while out on a field trip and is somehow or other subsequently sent back in time to the prehistoric era. Almost immediately he meets cute cave girl and then more stuff happens.
You would think that an 80's time-travelling teen-comedy would at the very least have a few ideas up its sleeve. Well, you'd be wrong in this case as despite the potential in the set-up, all this one more or less boils down to is our protagonist trying to teach the cave girl English in order to facilitate having sex with her. It should be said at this point that Rex is a notably irritating central character who, despite being offered to us as the sympathetic underdog, came across little more than a sex pest. Not only that but in spite of his character being a high school student, the actor that played him looked like he was pushing forty. Needless to say, the antics of this individual are somewhat alienating and don't generate anything approaching empathy.
The film itself is a half-hearted sex comedy at best, with an early scene in a girl's locker room that did at least provide boobs which is never exactly ever going to be a bad production value. But really, the nudity is in short supply here overall and you really have to get into its humour and set-up to have any chance of appreciating it. Unfortunately, the comedy is really bad, resorting to a fart joke and an interminable sequence involving shaving cream. The prehistoric set-up is the only thing that really provides any interest but even that is pretty underwhelming on the whole, with boring cave people and little in the way of much else, aside from an encounter with a tribe of cannibals, which did enliven things a bit I have to say, although even that wasn't exactly very interesting. For a prehistoric comedy, you'd really be better off watching the cult movie Eegah (1962) or even the more recent California Man (1992); neither of those are exactly stellar stuff but both are marginally better than Cave Girl.
