"Caveman" seems more in the tradition of Alley Oop, crossed with Mel Brooks's Two Thousand Year Old Man. But the only artistic cross-reference it can manage is from the opening scene of Stanley Kubrick's "2000." In "Caveman", the cavemen are shown in the process of discovering modern fire, cooking, and music. During their epochal discoveries, the sound track teases us by quoting from Strauss's "Thus Spake Zarathustra," but never quite getting it right. Why bother to rewrite Strauss? He's out of copyright.
The movie has an interesting cast -- or would have an interesting cast, if the actors were given interesting things to do. Ringo Starrplays the leader of a wandering tribe, and onetime Oakland Raider Matuszak is the leader of the stronger tribe and the boyfriend of Barbara Bach, who wears push-up skunk skins. Starr feels great aloonda for Bach, and whenever he sees her, zug-zug is not far from his mind. But Matuszak is the kind of guy who can break a dinosaur's drumstick in two, and so Starr has to outsmart the big guy. Thus, intelligence is born.
