Back in the mid 60 and 70s cavemen films had come back, going initially for an adventure feel, alongside other dinosaur or prehistoric themed films (most already covered here), but it became clear soon that what made One Million Years B. C. a success wasn’t the stopmotion dinosaur effects by Ray Harryhausen, but Rachel Welch in cavegirl garments, and hence these film began more focusing on the cave girls and the “historical” excuse for pseudo-nudity.
In Italy we had a tradition of sexy comedies budding in the late 60s, so in the 70s some filmakers hopped onto the bandwagon and made sexy cavemen comedies like When Women Had Tails, while others latched unto the more extreme trend of the cannibal films.
It was a fad, in the grand scheme of things, but the genre survived into the early ’80s with stuff like the alredy reviewed Caveman, the one with Ringo Starr, which i assume was the catalyst for director Andy Luotto to try his hand at a caveman slapstick comedy, with Grunt!, indeed one of the more apt titles ever for a caveman comedy, sporting the tagline “La Clava E’ Uguale Per Tutti” (lit. “The Club Is Equal For All”), also used as a subtitle for the kinda modern DVD rerelease it got and which i’m using for review.
You can find the entire movie on Youtube, but you might need to find some subs unless you understand italian, as yes, it’s a dialogue-less film…. BUT there’s also a voice over narration by the director, Andy Luotto (also in the film as the caveman that looks like a Squawkabilly) talking bollocks that intervenes here and there.
Then again, it’s not like it makes the thing have more sense (it’s mostly bollocks, including random homophobic shit and shit tier cabaret jokes), but maybe there are some german dubs around, or maybe french, as far as i know there are no official english dubs for the film.
Which makes sense since there’s just so little voiceover to dub, and no spoken dialogue per sé.
As in, the characters just – indeed – grunt, belch, and converse/speak in “caveman gibberish”, at least in Caveman they did bother to make an actual caveman language of sorts, here they do not, and often they forgot and a random italian word slips from their lips.
And yes, this one was so obscure i discovered it when James “AVGN” Rolfe discussed the weird ass monkey rocketing through the air with egg film briefly shown in Fragasso’s Troll 2, not just a random sequence made ex novo but a clip from Andy Luotto’s Grunt, made 7 years earlier.
This is where i would tell you why Fragasso decide to sample that scene from that specific film… but then it’s also worth nothing Umberto Lenzi did use some footage from Grunt! as something to put on the TV in Paura Del Buio/Hitcher In The Dark (1989).
I assume it was because the film has so much absurd scenes that work as distractions, classic “the fuck i’m looking at?” bits, and because all these films were made by the italian Filmirage.
While i mentioned Caveman, Grunt! is more of a spoof of the french sci fi adventure film La Guerre De Feu (1981), translating to “The War Of/For Fire” but more known as Quest For Fire, based on a book of the same name by J. H. Rosny, with the movie having a surprise success and spurring other into the fry, like Gottlieb’s Caveman, or indeed Grunt, where instead of having early humans fight over the control of fire among themselves and their interactions with other hominid species, the conflict is about a magical egg.
Again, like Quest For Fire/La Guerre De Feu, there’s no spoken dialogue, and the main idea was also to trojan horse the film as a way to bring on cinema screens some TV comedians, italian film character actors or similar figures, heck, it has even a young Giorgio Faletti (RIP), whom later became an internationally renowed giallo novel writer.
There is trash, and there is Z grade cinema trash. Then there is Grunt.
this is some of the lowest comedy ever, the absolute abyss, the nothingness of comedy, not like the “void” element spoken by Musashi Miyamoto in his Book Of Five Rings, but something so bad its not just low, it’s actually nothing, some of the worse and more basic possible slapstick i’ve ever seen, it makes one wonder if an actual caveman wrote the thing.
And yet didn’t really focus too much on the “sexy women”, which are here but there’s no nudity, the focus is mostly in slapstick routine and cheap ass gags.
And i say it’s a parody of Quest For Fire…. and it is, but very loosely, as it’s more an ensemble of random ass vignettes until eventually the magical egg is discovered, stolen by a rival tribe and then a quest to retrive it begins with also other elements spoofing 2001: A Space Odissey.
But even so, the semblance of a plot doesn’t show up until 40 minutes into this 85 minutes films… and still doesn’t matter much as the quest for the mighty egg that explodes people in contact like … well, anything in Super Inframan constantly takes a backseat for some more stupid random shit.
This is the kind of film that borders on unreviewable, since it would easily devolve in just describing-explaining scenes or stuff, like how a caveman has a giant diaper, how he randomly invents cocaine (aka “booger sugar”) by wailing some flowers after he found a bee in one and hit the flowers in anger.
A caveman child burps like Barney Gumble and his belch splits open a rock nearby.
An old caveman with concrete shoes hypnotizing people until he’s hypnotized back, and revealed to be a chimpanzee.
Shit like this. Constantly. Often punctuated by cartoon sound effects like a Z-tier Looney Tunes live action escapade. Or badly cutting to and from obvious stock footage of a wild animal.
And then, when you think you’ve seen everything, before the egg falls into the water and thus loses its magica powers (don’t ask me why, i have no idea), there’s a random musical song number complete with a soubrette singer, which is still not good but damn it’s somewhat catchy and easily the best part of the film, almost makes the thing worth watching. Almost.
It’s definitely something to be seen to be believed, even though it wouldn’t call it “so bad it’s good”, this is so abysmally asinine dump it’s fascinating to witness, but only for bad movie buffs.
Definitely not Mamoru Oshii’s best opus.
As a side note, the DVD transfer in this out of print MHE/30 Holding release is very poor, so when it’s a bit dark in some part of the frame its pitch black and you can barely tell what are you looking, sometimes it’s almost too bright, as if the cameraman looked into the sun, possessed by Icarus himself. Plus there are no extras of any kind.
Not that this movie deserves a Criterion 2K restoration, but i know it’s the DVD version that’s shit since i’ve seen WAY better looking versions of the film online.
Thas said, Grunt was/is so bad that while it didn’t kill the cavemen-barbarian trend and the Italian entries that followed, it came pretty close, surely didn’t help, arguably it felt like the very last straw; and speaking of barbarians, it did came out one year after what is now a beloved italian trash cult classic, Attila: Flagello Di Dio (Attila; Scourge Of God), an undeniably better film.
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