Teenage Caveman (1958)

"In the beginning there was chaos and eternal night,” intones our omnipotent narrator. And then his voice said, “Let there be light; and the dark was separated from the light. There was created the waters, and the land. And there was made a sun to rule the day, the moon to rule the night, and the stars to give light to the darkness. The earth was made to bear growing green things and fruit. The animals were created, and they were fruitful and multiplied. And then there came ... Man."

Okay, then. Now, after that smattering of biblical blathering about the dawn of creation, our film then picks up the pace considerably with a rather spiffy animated credit sequence, utilizing the cave paintings and etchings of the Cro-Magnons we're about to meet.

It should also probably be noted upfront that these cave dwellers in question live in a small, blighted pocket of land nestled between a great river and the deserts of the Burning Plain; and here, they eke out a barely sustainable existence. They have no other choice, really, because to venture outside these strict geographical demarcations would break one of several ingrained tribal taboos.

Now, no one can really remember why these boundaries or rules were drawn up in the first place, but to even question them, let alone break them, is punishable by tribal ostracizing on the first offense, and then with two strikes, well, you're already out. Permanently and posthumously.

With that background established, our story picks up proper when the men of the tribe return from a successful hunt. As the rest of the clan celebrates, the tribal symbol-maker eagerly checks in with his wife on the location of their son, who is noticeably absent. And since the film never bothered with naming them, we’ll be referring to these two as Pops (Bradley) and Moms (Jocelyn).

Here, fearing his offspring has ventured across the Forbidden River, Pops finds the boy on a cliff overlooking said river, which gives a nice panoramic view of the valley beyond it that is teeming with life -- courtesy of some pilfered footage from Hal Roach’s One Million B.C. (1940) and Spencer Gordon Bennet’s Mysterious Island (1951).

Apparently, the boy -- let’s call him Bobbo (Vaughn) -- has reached that difficult age, where the more you tell him NOT to do something the more likely he will go out of his way to do just that. Thus, even though tribal law strictly forbids it, he has threatened to cross the river several times -- and it goes well beyond any open teenage rebelliousness. See, Bobbo just doesn’t understand, with all that food eagerly awaiting just a stone’s throw away, why his people are forced to settle for the bare pickings of the rock quarry they currently call home?

Pops, however, is a traditionalist, which leads to yet another argument on the tenets of their tribal laws, whose Catch-22 logic only infuriates Bobbo even more. The Law must be obeyed, Pops says, right or wrong -- and no matter how asinine, because it simply is the Law. And besides, there are worse things lurking beyond the Forbidden River than the great beasts and the sinking earth (alias quicksand).

When asked how he would know such things, caught in a contradiction, Pops admits that when he was younger he, too, crossed the river once; but he didn't tarry long for fear of running into the legendary 'Beast that Gives Death with its Touch.' 

Intrigued to know more about this hideous thing, Bobbo returns to the caves with his father, who refuses to elaborate further. Our junior malcontent then turns his attention to a trio of elders, who serve as keepers of the Three Great Gifts of Man: the first tends a small fire, the second spins a stone wheel, while the third constantly stacks up a pile of rocks only to knock them over to illustrate man's ability to create and destroy, as I'm sure their fathers and grandfathers did before them.

All of this, of course, seems rather pointless to Bobbo; but when he begins to question them this draws the unwanted attention of a certain surly older caveman -- let’s call him Grumpus (DeKova), who on one hand cajoles Bobbo into breaking the Law by crossing the river, but on the other gives everybody else an earful for Bobbo's blasphemous ways, saying his lack of faith in the Law will certainly bring sickness and death to the clan. 

And so, for some reason, Grumpus seems hellbent on making a pariah out of Bobbo, looking for any excuse to get him stoned by the others -- and I'm not referring to the herbal variety but the Shirley Jackson variety. As to why, well, we'll get to that in a minute. For now, we jump ahead to the next hunt, where Pops falls victim to an unfortunate looking bear attack (-- more on this Ursa Minor in a just a bit, too).

Critically mauled, the others bring Pops back to the caves, where, as wife and son watch, the tribal elder does his best to stitch him back together. 

Alas, with Pops laid up and unable to rein him in, Grumpus seizes this golden opportunity to goad Bobbo into exploring across the river. Bobbo, in turn, entices several other youths to accompany him, thanks to some stone-age fueled peer pressure.

But once they cross the Forbidden River, enter the surrounding jungle, and run right into a familiar looking monitor lizard and dorsal-finned crocodile, locked once more in their eternal cinematic combat, these wayward teenage cavemen are probably thinking at this point perhaps those old foolish taboos weren't so foolish after all...

If you ask Roger Corman, he'll tell you, quite insistently, that he never made a movie called Teenage Caveman (1958). However, he will admit to making a film called Prehistoric World back in 1958, an allegorical tale about a small group of stone-age cave dwellers and outdated social mores.

Now, 1958 was a big year for Corman. After ram-rodding almost ten features that ranged from Hawaiian intrigue in Naked Paradise (alias Thunder Over Hawaii, 1957), to killer crustaceans in Attack of the Crab Monsters (1957), to Scandinavian hijinx with the marquee-busting The Saga of the Viking Women and their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (alias Viking Women and the Sea Serpent, 1957) the year prior, Corman took a much needed break and finagled a global round-trip vacation on his bosses at American International Picture's dime, where, during a stop-over in Fiji, Corman claims to have been inducted into a tribe of Melanesian headhunters.

Roger Corman.

Upon his return, head still intact, Corman's next feature was a slight change of pace: a biopic on the notorious gangster, George Kelly, better known as Machine Gun Kelly (1958). And with the help of a strong script and stand out performances by Charles Bronson as the cowardly Kelly and Susan Cabot as his deadly muse, the production was a turning point in Corman's career as the film earned some favorable reviews, especially the European critics, who praised the low-budget auteur for his themes and overall aesthetics.

“Machine Gun Kelly was a career breakthrough for Charlie Bronson as well as a major turning point in my career,” said Corman in his autobiography, How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime (1990). The film got extremely favorable reviews in Europe, was shown at several festivals there, and became a hit in France. Suddenly, my work was being scrutinized and praised by critics and film scholars in journals like Cahiers due Cinema and Positif. I was being treated as a major filmmaker and Kelly was seen as a serious American film. To the French critics, the film expressed themes. I was making a statement, there was significance in certain moments, and the film had a visual style expressed through the camera.

“All of this was quite timely, since I, too, was beginning to take my filmmaking more seriously,” Corman continued. “I had never thought of myself as doing Great Art. I felt I was working as a craftsman, and if, out of some good, solid craftsmanship, something transcended, some portion of art emerged, that would be fine with me. But this was still low-budget stuff -- fast schedules, five figure productions, exploitation subjects. Art was not something I consciously aspired to create. My job was to be a good craftsman.”

And while Machine Gun Kelly was finding its legs, Corman's next picture, The Wasp Woman, featured a cosmetic magnate (Cabot again) concocting some de-aging cream based on the royal jelly of a queen wasp with some unforeseen, Were-Wasp side-effects. And though it lacked the subtlety and lofty notions of its predecessor, The Wasp Woman was another important milestone as it was the first film Corman financed and distributed independently through his new company, The Filmgroup.

Now, all of this set the stage for his next feature, a strange mash-up of Kelly's psychological themes and subtext mixed with the gonzo schlock of The Wasp Woman, where Corman the craftsman apparently believed in his new auteur press-clippings a bit too much, perhaps, as he pretentiously pounded the resulting film within an inch of its life with a giant clown-hammer of significance to make a slightly misguided statement.

For his script, Corman turned to Robert Wright Campbell, who had also done the screenplay for Machine Gun Kelly, and on whose insistence got Dick Miller dropped from the leading role, opening the door for Bronson.

Robert Wright Campbell (Five Guns West, 1954).

Campbell had also scripted Five Guns West (1954) -- kind of a scaled down version of The Dirty Dozen (1967) set during the American Civil War, which was Corman's first direct effort for James Nicholson and Samuel Arkoff's American Releasing Corporation -- an early predecessor of American International Pictures. And in lieu of a pay increase, the screenwriter settled for taking a part in the movie as one of the five pardoned Confederates who must track down a former comrade or face the hangman's noose.

In between these productions, Campbell was nominated for an Academy Award for the Lon Chaney bio Man of a Thousand Faces (1957), and he would subsequently go on to write The Young Racers (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964) and The Secret Invasion (1964) for Corman. 

Floyd Crosby (right).

Behind the camera, one cannot discount the contributions of another Corman regular, Floyd Crosby, who probably did more than anyone or anything else to establish the signature "Corman look."

The father of singer David Crosby, Floyd Crosby had been making features since the 1930s, mostly award-winning documentaries. Before hooking up with Corman for The Monster from the Ocean Floor (1954), Crosby shot the likes of High Noon (1952) and From Here to Eternity (1953) for Fred Zinnemann. And while he was never officially blacklisted during the Communist witch-hunts of the 1950s, the left-leaning Crosby did wind up on the unofficial gray list, which saw him banned from the majors. 

Corman and Crosby at work (The Pit and the Pendulum, 1961).

But he landed on his feet well enough with the minors, and he would continue to work with Corman for almost a decade, including all the Poe pictures -- House of Usher (1960), The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), before finishing up his career with William Asher on American International's Beach Party (1964) sequels -- Bikini Beach (1964), Beach Blanket Bingo (1965).

And for those of you walking into this one cold, expecting some massive dinosaur action as the posters promised, I'll warn you off now. Perhaps still stinging from Jack Rabin's well-documented failure to deliver a passable monster for Viking Women and the Sea Serpent, Corman appeared to be content to ride the stock-footage express, and all we'll be getting for the duration are some clumsy inserts.

So, with his script set, his FX already in the can, and an allotted budget of $70000, Corman’s cast and crew descended upon the Iverson Ranch and Bronson Canyon for the majority of the scheduled ten day shoot. For those unfamiliar with this location (-- but five bucks says you'll recognize a few of its landmark caves that have appeared in hundreds of movies and TV shows), Bronson Canyon is just a small part of Griffith Park, which is located just north of Hollywood; a sprawling 4200-acre refuge that also includes the Los Angeles Zoo and the Griffith Observatory.

Redefined by the Union Rock Company, who quarried out those caves to provide the concrete that helped pave Los Angeles, when the company folded in 1928 Bronson Canyon's relative isolation in the middle of a major movie-making metropolis drew plenty a filmmaker to its rocky environs, where everyone from the Lone Ranger to Ro-Man the Robot Monster (1953) stalked its familiar nooks and crannies.

Corman also utilized another familiar Hollywood landmark, the LA County Arboretum and Botanical Gardens, which MGM had extensively used for their Tarzan features. Founded by race horse enthusiast Elias "Lucky" Baldwin, the Arboretum was only part of his Arcadia estate that also included the Santa Anita racetrack. And it was here, in these environs, that Corman shot for one day to get the footage of our teenage caveman’s doomed expedition to the other side of the Forbidden River.

The river itself was played by yet another legendary location at the Arboretum known as The Duck Pond. Now, the Duck Pond was notorious for being both stagnant and completely crusted over with duck feces. There are even production tales on other films that required chainsaws to cut out chunks of offal to find water underneath for the understandably reluctant actors to wade into and in some cases drown -- like the poor soul bringing up the rear of that retreat, who, alas, falls victim to the sinking earth.

Yeah, after sufficiently soiling their loincloths with both acey and deucey at the sight of those aforementioned stock-footage behemoths, our errant party of Teen-Magnons beat a hasty Benny Hill back toward friendlier environs. But one of their number veers off course and falls victim to the Sinking Earth. This victim was played by Corman regular, Beech Dickerson, and he dies AH-lot in this movie. Stay tuned. All will be explained. Just not sure if you will ever believe it.

Anyhoo, between his death and the other horrors they've witnessed, those still alive leave Bobbo behind and return to the caves. Here, Grumpus happily listens in on their dire report, and then continues to poison the clan against Bobbo and his dangerous inklings.

Meanwhile, as the song goes, back in the jungle, after having the last word with a tormenting squirrel, Bobbo makes camp for the night and starts a fire. This attracts the attention of some lumpy, beaked over-sized potato with legs and arms that could only be the Beast that Gives Death with its Touch. (More on this familiar looking critter in a sec, too.) 

Here, when his torch fails to scare the creature away, Bobbo once more quickly retreats -- but in his haste to get away, our hero scores a spectacular George of the Jungle-level face-plant into a nearby tree that knocks him out cold.

Meanwhile, meanwhile, back at the caves, Pops has finally recovered enough to receive the news about his son crossing the Forbidden River two days ago, and how he hasn’t been seen or heard from since. Then, after one more night of recuperation, he sets off to bring the prodigal back home.

Now, the prodigal in question is currently stumbling around in a daze, trying to walk-off a most certain concussion. However, and quite inexplicably, this blow to the head appears to have sped-up the evolutionary process as this cranial trauma / cognitive turbo-boost allows Bobbo to suddenly invent a rudimentary bow and arrow mock-up, which he uses to bring down a(n already taxidermied) stag. And with his stiff prize slung over his shoulders, and having survived several days on the forbidden side of the river relatively unscathed, Bobbo triumphantly marches back to the caves.

Alas, this celebration appears to be a bit premature when he is set upon by a pack of feral dogs. Luckily, they seem to be more interested in his kill than him; and with the timely arrival of Pops, they manage to extricate themselves from the mongrels' feeding frenzy and return home, where something even more perilous is awaiting our boy, Bobbo.

You see, for his flagrant violation of tribal law that resulted in the death of another, Bobbo must face a tribunal to see if he will meet the same fate. For the prosecution, Grumpus sounds off on the long list of heresy charges against the defendant and believes a death sentence is in order. And for the defense, Pops paints his son as a first time offender and seeks probation.

Here, the village elder sides with Pops and passes his sentence: Bobbo must be treated as one who is dead until he reaches the age of manhood. Here, Grumpus totally loses it and attacks the defendant. A nasty dust-up ensues until the parties are separated before they can kill each other.

After the adjournment, as an ostracized persona non grata, Bobbo’s silent treatment commences, as no one is allowed to interact or speak to him for the duration of his sentence. Effectively grounded, Bobbo refocuses his attention on a fair-haired maiden -- lets call her Blondie (Marshall), who've been eyeballing each other since the opening credits. And while she does a little skinny-dipping at the local watering hole, Bobbo serenades her with a Zamfir flute, which he cobbled together during his yonder genius-attack across the river.

A progressive kind of gal, Blondie ignores the Law and speaks with him. And together, they have a healthy conversation on what lies even beyond the river, the future of the clan, and the horrors of a group-think theocracy. Here, as their love is cemented, Blondie begs Bobbo to take it easy and not get himself killed, for her sake if nothing else. But before he can respond, they’re interrupted by a loud commotion back at the caves.

Now, turns out the cause of all this hubbub is a lone rider, who approaches the caves from the Burning Plain, where, according to the Law, nothing can exist. And on top of that, since these people have never seen a man ride another beast before, one can understand and appreciate why they're all a little freaked-out by his sudden appearance.

Grumpus, of course, immediately brands this contradicting anomaly as being evil and demands they kill it before the thing gets too close. But recognizing another brave explorer like himself, Bobbo does his best to calm everyone down, Alas, and soon enough, fear wins out, the spears start flying, and the stranger is knocked from his steed. And while Grumpus leads the charge to kill the horse, too, Bobbo rushes to the rider's aid. And while he is only wounded, the rider manages to utter only one word,“Peace,” before Grumpus runs him through.

With this golden opportunity to prove the Law is fallible wasted, Bobbo is beside himself. However, it wasn't a total loss as Pops and several others admit their eyes are now open to the fact that some laws might just be a tad bit antiquated. But when he tries to express these thoughts at the next tribal council meeting, Pops is shouted down and loses his job as the symbol maker to Grumpus.

And here, we finally get to the root of Grumpus' insidious behavior. For not only did he covet the symbol maker's position, he also has a lecherous eye on Blondie -- in a drag her into his cave by the hair sense, which helps explain why he's so darned insistent on getting Bobbo impaled on the end of his spear.

Fortunately, Bobbo behaves himself and goes through the motions until his sentence is commuted. Now a man, he can make it official with Blondie. And at her suggestion, they make their own cave to *ahem* lie in, which really pisses Grumpus off because there is no law against such a thing. And for a while, Bobbo is content doing what cavemen do; but eventually, the wanderlust overtakes him.

This time, however, he has a plan. And that plan is to cross the river and slay the Beast that Gives Death with its Touch, and then bring its head back to the tribal council to show them how flawed the Law really is and destroy it forever.

After he sneaks off, with the way Blondie keeps mooning and staring at the path that leads to the Forbidden River, it doesn't take Moms long to deduce what has happened. She quickly rounds Blondie up before her behavior alerts anyone else, and then gets Pops up to speed, who takes up his spear and goes after his idiot son again, again.

Alas, the ever lurking Grumpus figures this all out, too. And after gathering everyone together, he goes into a long sermon filled with fire and brimstone about evil seeking out evil; and to save the clan from pestilence and certain death, he declares the former symbol maker and his son must die.

Here, his megalomaniacal speechifying soon has everyone else riled up, too; and then Grumpus leads this armed rabble to the river, all of them looking for blood. However, in an interesting twist, Grumpus has to do some fast talking to convince the others that since they're on a Holy Crusade it’s okay for them to cross the river just this once in service of the Law.

Bobbo, meanwhile, armed with his trusty bow, manages to track down his prey just as Pops catches up with him.

Taking aim while filling Pops in on his grand plan to slay the monster and slay the Law in one fell swoop, however, when the Beast doesn't attack but gestures openly with its hands, a confused Bobbo lowers his weapon.

Realizing the Beast is trying to communicate with them, Bobbo starts to mimic its actions until the Grumpus-led posse breaks into the same clearing -- with that pack of feral dogs hot on their heels!

Then, all hell breaks loose as the tribe fends off the dogs, allowing Grumpus to sneak away and seize a large rock that he chucks toward our hero. 

Now, I'm not really sure who he was aiming for -- the Beast or Bobbo, but the Beast takes the rock to the noggin and collapses in a heap. In retaliation, a well placed arrow finally puts Grumpus out of his, and Bobbo's, and our misery.

With Grumpus dead, the dogs beaten off, and the Beast Who Gives Death with its Touch lying prostrate before them, the surviving cavemen cautiously gather around and realize the creature is dead, too.

Looking closer, Bobbo seizes its head and removes it, revealing it was some form of helmet; and underneath it they see the wizened face of something very human. Totally confused, further digging finds a book filled with pictures of modern man (circa 1958). That's right. All the time, it was ... They finally really did it. Those maniacs blew it up! Ah, damn them! God damn them all to hell!

Confused? Don't worry, as the film gives us the first posthumously narrated epilogue to clear things up.

Apparently, the Beast was really an astronaut who was off planet when the bombs fell. And though technically dead, he goes on to explain that after the Atomic Armageddon, the world was thrown back into the stone age, where several pockets of humanity managed to survive. And how those weren't dinosaurs and other mega-fauna we observed but mutations.

Over the ensuing years this astronaut watched from afar, as the lingering radiation of his survival suit that kept him alive all this time also killed anyone who got too close, as mankind, not wanting to make the same mistakes twice, let several Luddite notions take root, keeping things nice and primitive.

But now, with progressive folks like Bobbo and Blondie leading the way, civilization will take its first steps in properly starting over again. However, the film leaves us with these sobering thoughts:

"This happened a long time ago. And as you know, men did meet other men; and fire smelted metal ... made explosives. The wheel turned machines and made gun barrels. The towers were built and flattened. How many times? Will it happen again? And if it does, will any at all survive the next time? Or will this finally be … The End."

Now, one would like to give Teenage Caveman some credit for beating the post-apocalyptic shock revelation of Planet of the Apes (1968) to the punch by almost a decade, but this was kinda stolen wholesale from Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story, By the Waters of Babylon, which first saw publication as The Place of the Gods in the Saturday Evening Post (July 31, 1937), and then later reprinted in The Pocket Book of Science Fiction (1943).

In Benét’s allegorical tale, a primitive tribe lives among the mammoth ruins and wreckage of an advanced civilization that they believe their gods had abandoned. The crux of the story involves the son of a priest, who goes on a walkabout to find out where these divine beings went. But while trying to discover the fabled and forbidden Place of the Gods, this ends up being the remains of New York City after some great cataclysm -- the story refers to it as The Great Burning, which was inspired by the devastating aerial bombings of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War in 1937 and presciently predicted the aftermath of an atomic detonation in Hiroshima and Nagasaki that ended World War II in 1945.

After finding a corpse amongst the rubble, the boy then realizes these are not gods, and never were, but people like him. He then susses out that he and his tribe are direct descendants of these beings, who were knocked back to the Stone Age due to their forefathers hubris and genocidal folly. But when he returns to the tribe with his enlightened discoveries, his father, who sort of knew the truth all along, warns of telling the others, saying they won’t be able to handle the truth about the falsehoods of their ingrained religion. The boy capitulates, but as the story ends, he swears that someday, “We must build again.”

Thus, By the Waters of Babylon was kind of raided and plundered mercilessly by director Corman and screenwriter Campbell, who left nothing in the pantry, and then wrapped it up in loincloths and furs and stock-footage lizards and hoped nobody would notice.

As far as I know, no one did notice but Corman would kinda do the same thing again with The Brain Eaters (1958), which was a blatant rip-off of Robert Heinlein's The Puppet Masters. Only this time he got caught, got sued, and eventually settled out of court -- though one should note that despite his victory, as the legend goes, one of the stipulations of that settlement was to keep Heinlein's name OUT of that dog-eared film’s credits.

Back to Teenage Caveman, to pull off Campbell’s script in front of the camera, Corman found another diamond in the rough in the form of Robert Vaughn, who was 26 at the time of filming. Born into a showbiz family -- his father was a radio actor and his mother a stage actress -- Vaughn found his acting legs on the stage, too, which landed him several bit parts in television on the likes of Dragnet and Gunsmoke.

His first feature was as an extra in The Ten Commandments (1956), where if you squint you can see him genuflecting in front of the golden calf before being smited by Moses. (And if you squint even harder you can spot him again holding a spear next to the Pharaoh.) Vaughn’s first credited role would be in the western Hell’s Crossroads (1957), where he played Bob Ford -- the man who shot the notorious outlaw, Jesse James (Henry Brandon). He then took the lead in No Time to Be Young (1957), a screed on the horrors of juvenile delinquency.

Corman first saw him in the stage production of Calder Willingham’s End as a Man and signed him to play his teen-aged caveman. And this time spent in the B-movie trenches soon paid off as the very next year found Vaughn nominated for an Academy Award as Best Supporting Actor for The Young Philadelphians (1959); and the year after that found him riding to glory with The Magnificent Seven (1960). Vaughn would go on to star in many more films but will most likely be best remembered for his role as Napoleon Solo in the TV spy series, The Man From U.N.C.L.E. (1964-1968).

As for his co-stars, this appears to be the only feature film for former Miss Teen-Age America, Darah Marshall, which is too bad, but several sources say she went on to a fairly successful stage career. As for Vaughn’s parents, Leslie Bradley was a veteran actor and a Corman irregular, having appeared in Naked Paradise and Attack of the Crab Monsters; and June Jocelyn was a regular for fellow American International alum, Bert I. Gordon, having appeared in The Amazing Colossal Man (1957), War of the Colossal Beast (1958), Attack of the Puppet People (1958), and The Spider (alias Earth vs. the Spider, 1958). Sharp eyes will also easily spot others from Corman's unofficial stock company, Jonathan Haze and Ed Nelson, as fellow cavemen.

I'll also give a big shout out to veteran character actor Frank DeKova and his cajoling, snake-in-the-grass take on the villain of our melodrama. Another Corman irregular, DeKova was a holdover from Machine Gun Kelly but spent most of his career playing Native Americans, including his most memorable role as Chief Wild Eagle in the criminally under-appreciated wild west sit-com F-Troop (1965-1967). For once you embrace the lunacy, that show is friggin’ brilliant.

And speaking frankly, when you take into account the overall tenor of the leaden and heavy-handed dialogue they were required to regurgitate, dressed like that, and in that setting, all of the actors and extras involved deserve some major props for keeping a straight face, which brings us back to the real star of the show, and the man who really glued the picture together: Beech Dickerson. Wait, you say. Who the hell is Beech Dickerson?! Well, I’ll let the man introduce himself.

"I must be the only person in the world who ever played three death scenes and attended his own funeral in the same movie,” said Dickerson (Corman, 1990). Unlike Bradley or DeKova, Dickerson was a Corman regular both in front of the camera and behind the scenes, and he would function in both capacities for Teenage Caveman, where his multi-tasking did, indeed, see him die multiple times on screen.

Beach Dickerson (left), Robert Vaughn (right).

I go into greater detail on the Life and Times of Beech Dickerson and his time serving in the Corman Factory on a tribute page for his efforts in this film, so here, we’ll just give you the highlights:

Now, the first time Dickerson dies in Teenage Caveman was during the bear hunt, where Pops is mauled -- only you don’t really see him. See, while shooting, and presumably waiting for a bear wrangler to show up with his trained animal, someone presented Dickerson with a bear costume instead.

“I asked Beech to double as a bear that stalks the tribe,” said Corman (Corman, 1990). “I had him come down a steep path, stop, look over the valley below, then continue down. That's all I told him. How much direction or rehearsal can you give a bear?”

Said Dickerson, “It's 150-degrees inside this f@cking bear suit, and I'm dying.” Then, when it came to the attack scene, he heard his director yell, “Bear, stand up.” So, he stands up. “Bear, growl!” So, he growled, but it's not convincing enough. “Mean, Bear, mean!”

Roger Corman (left), Beach Dickerson (right).

As instructed, he growled louder and violently scratched at the air with his 'deadly paws.' But, nope. "Meaner, Bear. I want you meaner!" Meanwhile, said Dickerson, “I'm dying inside this suit, growling and flailing, and then [my director] yells to the rest of the extras, 'Okay, tribesmen. Kill that f@cking bear!' And thirty guys jump me, take me down, and beat the shit out of me.”

Truth told, at full speed, the fake bear attack was actually quite effective. I’m just as shocked as you are, thanks to Dickerson’s efforts.

For his next death scene, we move to that poop-encrusted duck pond. Yeah, that’s Dickerson bringing up the rear, who was instructed to fall off a log, splash down into the brackish water, and then drown.

Here, Dickerson held his breath, dived in, and started flailing around. Again, Corman was not convinced and refused to cut, ordering his actor to make it more believable. And after already swallowing several gulps of the putrid water, which were about to come back up the actor later testified, Dickerson really leaned into it, went berserk, and then sank below the surface until his bubbles petered out. And as his “corpse” bobbed back to the surface, luckily for Dickerson, Corman’s cheapness was in his favor as there was no time or money for a second take.

Then, when the action moved to Bronson Canyon, Corman found Dickerson lingering around the wardrobe truck and ordered him to get into costume. Reminded that his character was dead, Corman said not to worry about it because no one would notice. Well, actually, it’s kinda hard not to once you’ve spotted him. And its pretty easy to do. (See above.)

Which brings us to the third time Dickerson is killed in Teenage Caveman, and it concerns the pivotal scene where the rider appears from the Burning Plain. Again, Dickerson was a last minute casting decision on this part, too.

“They draped me up looking like General Grant with a bearskin rug, a paste on beard, and a big black wig,” said Dickerson, who was soon thrown on a horse and looking for a soft spot to land. There wasn’t any. “I’m not a stuntman,” he told Corman, who assured his actor he was just as capable of falling off a horse as anyone else -- and save his producer $50 in stunt fees.

Remember, the scene in question required Dickerson to ride into the village and be stoned to death -- or in this case, speared to death, by the frightened tribesman. Now, if you take a closer look at this sequence, as we cut back and forth between the rider and the knot of frightened and belligerent cavemen, you can also spot Dickerson lingering in the crowd. 

And most hilariously of all, Guess who threw the fateful spear that caused the rider to fall off the horse to his death? That’s right. Not only has he died for a third time, but Dickerson has managed to kill himself on screen. Only this time, there had to be a second take because Crosby caught a glimpse of Dickerson’s tighty-whities in the viewfinder as he went ass over tea-kettle falling off the horse that ruined the shot.

And sure enough, you can spot Dickerson playing the drum at his own funeral. And then he shows up yet again in another wig for the climax. You can’t make this shit up, my Fellow Programs.

Or course, all of this nonsense led me to invent The Beech Dickerson Drinking Game. All you need is your favorite beverage and a copy of Teenage Caveman, and then drink whenever you spot him -- which is a lot. (I’ve also slapped together a Home Version if you can’t get yourselves a copy of the film.) 

As I mentioned, Dickerson was a jack-of-all-trades for Corman, who would go on to build a monster out of Brillo pads, ping-pong balls, and pipe cleaners for Corman’s The Creature from the Haunted Sea (1961). I bring this up because the exact origin of the suit for the Beast that Gives Death With its Touch is a little murky. 

Some sources credited it to Paul Blaisdell, who provided the memorable monsters for Corman's Day the World Ended (1955) and It Conquered the World (1956). But there’s no mention of it in Randy Palmer’s exhaustive biography on Blaisdell; and on top of that, the costume is a little too shabby to be one of Blaisdell’s oddball creations. 

So I think these rumors are false -- though several of Blaisdell’s creations do appear in the film as inserts, representing other radiation-scarred beasties.

What we do know for sure is the monster pulled double-duty as it also appeared as the alien in the Corman produced Night of the Blood Beast (1958), which was shot about two weeks after Teenage Caveman. And somewhat surprisingly, that wasn’t Dickerson ensconced inside the suit. No, the suit was worn by Ross Sturlin in both films; and that’s Sturlin as the decrepit astronaut unmasked during the climax, too. 

Sturlin would suffer through the same heat prostration as Dickerson had while sealed up in the bear suit. And the costume was modified slightly for the second film because, as the legend goes, someone thought the creature’s hooked nose looked “too Jewish” and was then shorn-down to resemble more of a beak.

Hoping to cash in on Herman Cohen's wildly successful I Was a Teenage Werewolf (1957), it was the brass at American International who changed the title from Prehistoric World to the more exploitable Teenage Caveman -- it was even packaged with Cohen's third teenage monster-fueled sequel, How to Make a Monster (1958). 

“Roger wanted to call the picture Prehistoric World, which I abhorred,” said Arkoff (Flying Through Hollywood by the Seat of My Pants, 1992), who financed the production with Nicholson through AIP. “There was nothing new or novel about it. Dozens of museums have exhibits called ‘prehistoric world.’ Also, take a look at the plot. Don’t forget that near the end of the movie, the audience realizes they’re not watching a story about prehistoric men at all; it’s about survivors of a modern day atomic holocaust! A title like Prehistoric World is just going to confuse them.”

 The Los Angeles Times (September 3, 1958).

In rebuttal, Corman had this to say (Corman, 1990), “For one brief, insane moment, AIP had major hits with I Was a Teenage Werewolf and I Was a Teenage Frankenstein (1957). So they released my film as Teenage Caveman. I can still remember the opening sentence in the first review in the Los Angeles Times, ‘Despite its 10-cent title, Teenage Caveman is a surprisingly good picture.’”

Technically, it was the second sentence as the review in question, courtesy of Geoffrey Warren (Los Angeles Times, September 5, 1958), while not quite a gusher, was overall fairly positive: “Without the epilogue," said Warren, "Teenage Caveman would have closed with an impact unusual in a low-budget production. However, the 10-cent title notwithstanding, this is an interesting motion picture and, judged within the context of its intent, remarkably good. Reviewing the story, beyond noting that it delineates a young caveman’s search for truth while defying his clan’s unsound laws, would tend to reveal the excellent and unexpected conclusion. R. Wright Campbell’s story deserved a larger investment, though with Roger Corman’s direction it received a fair shake.”

The Miami News (December 7, 1958).

Said Arkoff, “Roger, who often insisted that his movies contained subtle, social messages, must have loved the critical reaction to Teenage Caveman. For example, the reviewer in Variety called it ‘a plea for international cooperation in terms of the dangers of atomic radiation.’ That was music to Roger’s socially conscious ears.”

According to several sources, Corman claimed that after the favorable reviews came in, American International changed the name back to Prehistoric World. But I think we can chalk that one up to wishful thinking and a faulty memory as I can find no trace of any advertisements under that banner, just Teenage Caveman. I do believe it was originally intended to be released as Prehistoric World though, as I have found several stills touting it as such and several more with very obvious Teenage Caveman snipes pasted over the top of them. And to add even more confusion, in the UK the film was released as Out of the Darkness. 

Regardless of whatever title you see it under, Corman's prehistoric / post-apocalyptic tale is by no means a bad film, a bit pretentious maybe -- hell, definitely, but I still dig it, and it ranks as one of my absolute favorite episodes of Mystery Science Theater 3000 (Season 4, Episode 15). The resulting film barely breaks over an hour, and with its heavy allegorical themes it might've been better served as an episode of The Outer Limits (1963-1965), where I think it would've fit right in somewhere between “The Zanti Misfits” and “The Controlled Experiment.”

Don't get me wrong, as I said, I like the movie quite a bit and have always admired Corman's chutzpah of wheedling and weaving his progressive and anti-establishment views into his films; sometimes subtly, other times not so much; and with Teenage Caveman he's about as subtle as a punch to the groin when expressing his thoughts, through his protagonist, on the horrors of teen angst, the generation gap, and sticking it to the man and his archaic dogma by going all Bergman on a 10-cent caveman picture.

But in the end, just like with a lot of Corman's work, from what I've read, what winds up on screen doesn't prove nearly half as entertaining as the story behind the actual making of it. And there ya go.

Originally posted on December 15, 2009, at 3B Theater.

Teenage Caveman (1958) Malibu Productions :: American International Pictures / EP: James H. Nicholson, Samuel Z. Arkoff / P: Roger Corman / D: Roger Corman / W: R. Wright Campbell / C: Floyd Crosby / E: Irene Morra / M: Albert Glasser / S: Robert Vaughn, Darah Marshall, Frank DeKova, Leslie Bradley, June Jocelyn, Jonathan Haze, Beach Dickerson