Among the mostly uninspired other Creature Features titles, Teenage Caveman was the one standout. The Creatures Features team took the radical step of hiring Larry Clark as director. Larry Clark is best known for such uncompromisingly incisive films as Kids (1995), Bully (2001) and Ken Park (2002), all of which concern themselves with really troubled teens. Certainly Larry Clark is not the first name that comes to mind when making a Creature Feature – and that’s clearly the thinking that informed Arkoff’s decision to approach Clark, as the filmed interview that accompanies that film’s cable premiere makes clear.

The original Teenage Caveman (1958) was a Roger Corman film. The film’s hook was entirely a conceptual reversal – one where what we initially think is a caveman film is turned about in the final act to show us it is in fact a post-holocaust tale. Teenage Caveman 01 by comparison reveals itself as a post-holocaust tale in the very first scene. Thereafter it makes a beeline for the territories that Larry Clark usually inhabits – the sex lives of teens. Clark sets up a standard scene where the teens are puzzling over artifacts/text from the past – only here it’s a copy of Penthouse Forum: “I never believed these stories were true until my conservative wife asked me to ream her bunghole with a vibrating dildo,” “What’s a bunghole?” Later Clark choreographs a somewhat gratuitous ten-minute long handheld camera-shot orgy of coke, alcohol and sex. If nothing else what Arkoff and co have gotten out of Clark is someone who launches with alacrity right across the taboo lines the rather staid other Creature Features trod. In the most startlingly perverse scene Clark has Hayley Keenan fall sick as Richard Hillman and Tiffany Limos sit on a bed, with Limos masturbating as she watches Hayley Keenan’s stomach literally explode.

On the other hand, Teenage Caveman is clearly more of a Larry Clark film than a Creature Feature. There’s a monster at the end, seemingly because being a Creature Feature mandates it. On the level of a face-value reading, the Creature Feature aspect gives Clark’s usual proclivities an almost comic exaggeration. Clark loves to create apocalyptic pictures of contemporary youth gone way out of control and indulging in sex, drugs and alcohol. Clark loves these horror portraits, but for all the conservative ire that his films have raised, Clark is not too far removed from those who condemn him in his dismissal of modern youth as having gone fundamentally awry due to lack of parental controls. Teenage Caveman seems to metaphorically echo most of the same basic themes as Kids – kids escape autocratic adult controls against them having sex, fall in with other bad kids, indulge in drugs and alcohol with abandon, and then have unprotected sex that leave them with a deadly infection. On the looming level of metaphor, Teenage Caveman is almost comically silly but in terms of Clark’s boundary pushing images it is startling.

Lead bad guy Richard Hillman overacts horrendously, but his partner in crime Tiffany Limos gives a sexy and amazingly assured performance on screen. She’s got talent and a future ahead of her – one hopes to hear from her again. [And she quickly proved equally awesome the following year in Larry Clark’s Ken Park]

(Nominee for Best Supporting Actress (Tiffany Limos) at this site’s Best of 2001 Awards).