Review: Encino Man (1992)

Encino Man (1992)

Rated PG for mild language and sensuality

Score: 2 out of 5

There are a lot of things that typically get left out when we start nostalgically romanticizing the past. I'm not just talking about decisions by our leaders that, with the benefit of hindsight, we'd prefer to forget about today; I mean pop culture ephemera that hasn't stood the test of time in the slightest. When we talk about the great music of the decade of peace and love, we're usually not talking about the #1 single "Sugar, Sugar" by The Archies. When we talk about '70s grindhouse theaters, we like to talk more about the moviegoing experience rather than just how bad a lot of those grindhouse flicks really were. '80s nostalgia specials devote much more time to Miami Vice than Manimal. And when we remember the '90s "counterculture", we have a tendency to memory-hole the fact that, for several years, Pauly Shore was a superstar among that crowd. Starting his career as a stand-up comedian and later an MTV VJ, Shore was known for his comic alter-ego of "The Weasel", a parody of a California surfer dude who likely popularized half the "totally radical" slang of the '90s. This film marked his successful breakout bid for movie stardom, leading to a string of increasingly bad comedies that finally bottomed out four years later with the notorious bomb Bio-Dome.

I've barely even talked about Encino Man itself, and that's because, save for its breakout supporting cast member, there's barely anything interesting to talk about here. It's a caveman comedy that operates on little internal logic, barely even has a plot until the third act, does nothing interesting with its setup, and often seems to forget what it's even about beyond being a vehicle for Shore's comedic stylings. It has a precious few flashes of inspiration, but they all felt like diamonds in the deep rough of the rest of this movie. It's not even an interesting kind of bad, since you can see right from the start that this movie's greatest failure is that, much like Shore's slacker character, it barely even tries, instead feeling content to coast on its wacky premise. All that Encino Man really accomplished was to remind me that there are some things about the '90s that are best left forgotten.

The movie starts with a caveman struggling to survive the harsh winter of the ice age before he and his girlfriend are entombed in snow when an earthquake causes their cave to collapse. Cut to the present day of 1992, where the town of Encino, California has been built atop that cave. Dave Morgan, a geeky teenage boy looking to win the affection of his childhood friend Robyn Sweeney, discovers our still-frozen caveman while digging a pool in his backyard. Thinking that he's made the find of the century, Dave and his friend Stanley "Stoney" Brown store the ice block in his garage, where it thaws out and releases the still very much alive caveman, who the two of them name "Link" after the missing link. Dave and Stoney try to get Link under control and acclimate him to 20th century teenage life, claiming that he's an exchange student from Estonia while teaching him to pick up chicks, "wheez the juice" from the ICEE machine at the minimart, and speak in contemporary English as taught by a teenage surfer dude.

To be fair, there was a lot of potential for a funny movie in here. We could've had a story about Link's caveman ways making him the coolest and most tubular dude in school, perhaps juxtaposing his stupidity with that of the teenagers around him, or one about Dave and Stoney getting into increasingly silly shenanigans in order to keep Link from getting taken by government scientists, E.T.-style and perhaps as a parody of such. We get bits of the funnier, if not necessarily smarter, movie that could've been at various points, most notably with the plot at the end involving the jock bully Matt finding out who and what "Linkovich Chomovsky" really is. I also did like Brendan Fraser as Link, juxtaposing the caveman he once was with the Jackass-style dude that Stoney turns him into, a guy who falls in love with thrash metal and pulls silly hijinks all over town. The problem is, the film doesn't seem to actually treat him as the main character. While Dave is the ostensible protagonist, and Link is the central MacGuffin of the story, both of them wound up feeling like secondary characters next to Stoney, played by Shore at his most Weaselly. The dude's charisma takes over the movie, which might've been a good thing if not for the fact that Stoney was probably the most annoying character in the film, causing many of Dave and Link's problems while coming across as a marketable grab-bag of '90s "cool kid" stereotypes, like an even more obnoxious version of young John Connor in Terminator 2. Yes, like I mentioned earlier, he probably came up with a lot of those stereotypes, but that didn't make him any less insufferable playing a character we're supposed to take as a cool rebel even though we never see him doing much that's rebellious except be a slacker.

Shore's character in this film is a snapshot of the greater problem of just how safe it plays everything. It's rated PG and was produced by Disney at a time when they were still having trouble shedding their family-friendly image, and as such, while it's about teenagers, has a soundtrack of early '90s metal, and has the bullies throwing around gay slurs, it still feels quite sanitized, less like the teen movies of its day and more like a live-action version of a Bart-focused Simpsons episode: wearing the style, but feeling like it's holding back. There were all manner of radical jokes, even just PG-13-rated ones, that a movie about a caveman in the present day could've gone in on, everything from Link not knowing about modern sanitation and thus, say, taking a dump behind the bushes (and everybody noticing) to him wearing a skirt to school because it feels more like the loincloths he's used to -- and giving anybody who questions his masculinity a meeting with his fist. Instead, it wound up a film that seemed to run out of ideas about halfway in and just kept going anyway, settling for the easiest possible jokes about him riding a rollercoaster for the first time or drawing cave paintings everywhere he can.

The lack of inspiration extends to the rest of the film. If it has anything going for it beyond its few good jokes, it's mood, as it does a great job of capturing a very early '90s, post-Motley-Crue but pre-Nirvana moment in youth culture, when it seemed like Guns N' Roses and Right Said Fred were poised to take over the world, the same culture that Beavis & Butt-head skewered as it went on its way out during the grunge era. This movie is practically a snapshot of 1991-92, which is just about the only real sort of style it has; it was shot on the cheap in just over a month by a director who had previously only made behind-the-scenes documentaries, and it feels like it. Once you get past the soundtrack, the fashions, and Pauly Shore, this is a very dry movie to actually look at. The jokes are done no favors by any of it, and save for Shore and Fraser, most of the cast, including Sean Astin as Dave, feel like they're just there to collect a paycheck.

The Bottom Line

It isn't a truly loathsome movie like some of Pauly Shore's later films, but if this was the one that made him a star, I don't want to see the ones that derailed his career. Sometimes, much like this film's titular caveman, some things are best left buried in the time period they came from.