Not at all in the vein of homage, Teenage Caveman instead plays out like a quasi-sequel to Clark's Kids--meaning that most people will find it repugnant long before Winston's fake entrails hit the fan. Given that it's badly acted, plotted, and shot, the film is perhaps even too shoddy for admirers of Clark and strictly the domain of his apologists, myself possibly among them.

Set in a post-apocalyptic landscape, Teenage Caveman opens on a group of adolescent neo-Neanderthals who are under the leadership of a self-declared god (Paul Hipp), the father of tribesman David (Andrew Keegan). In defending true love Sarah (Tara Subkoff) against the "shaman"'s sexual advances (Dad being the only one allowed to indulge in the flesh), David slays his father; Sarah, with four of their friends, returns the favour by rescuing David from literal crucifixion, and the six of them lose consciousness in an ensuing storm in which they're whisked away, Dorothy Gale-like, to a desolate but functional city.

They come to inside a futuristic (technically prehistoric) compound run by the sexually voracious couple Neil (Richard Hillman) and Judith (Tiffany Limos). Virtual immortals because Neil was a human guinea pig in college research experiments, the two lure their young visitors into a Jacuzzi. From that point forward, Teenage Caveman becomes an extended orgy sequence that pauses occasionally to allow for violence so extreme it's downright Elizabethan. Clark's naturalist impulses often make up for the fact that he wears a film's themes on his sleeve, but he's let down here by performers incapable of the degrees between stiff and florid, with the exception of Hillman, who really seems to believe his character's hype and has a convincing jealous glare that is needlessly assisted by CGI.

Terrible beyond words is Limos, her frequent disrobing no reparation for her sub-soap opera delivery of dialogue; Keegan looks lost in the lead. Teenage Caveman is, in other words, a superficial show put on by a superficial cast--the film succumbs to camp. But it never conforms to the shape of something Stan Winston would associate himself with, including Pumpkinhead, Winston's sadistic directorial debut: Clark delivers yet another piece of underage anarchy porn, and as usual his camera is bravely probing. Unfortunately, while Teenage Caveman is a testament to Clark's auteurist position, it establishes him as a filmmaker of limited range.

Columbia Tri-Star presents Teenage Caveman in 1.77:1 anamorphic widescreen and fullscreen versions on the same side of a dual-layered DVD. The film stock was manipulated in post to appear blown-out and desaturated during the exteriors, but judging by the interior scenes, the transfer looks right, infinitely more detailed than that of the other "Creature Feature" I saw on disc, She Creature. The DD 5.1 track is active during the windstorm and caps the high frequencies of Limos' screeching; LFE usage is tame. Extras: a pointless 2-minute featurette on the costume design; a multi-part photo gallery (with priceless stills of Clark giving instructions to a mutant beast); filmographies straight off the IMDb; and trailers for the other "Creature Features" titles, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Urban Legends: Final Cut.-Bill Chambers