Director Les Mayfield
Starring Sean Astin, Brendan Fraser, Pauly Shore
Rated PG
Score 3/6

Stoney and Dave find a caveman (Link) trapped in ice, thaw him out, and show him around town. Although Link is slow to catch on to basic concepts of 20th century life, he has no trouble impressing all the girls and helping Stoney and Dave find the coolness they’ve been searching for.

The last time I reviewed a movie starring Pauly Shore was two ago. For those of you who might be interested Brendan Fraser made a cameo appearance in the 1993 film Son-in-Law as the caveman Link, also his appearance in the 1994 movie In the Army Now makes reference to Fraser’s caveman character with Fraser’s character having the name “Link” on his fatigues.

Pauly Shore movies are not the best of movies and are only really memorable in a nostalgic kind of way. Is Encino Man as funny as I remember being? Honestly, not really. But that is only because I can’t remember the last time, I watched it and it only made its way home because of the warm fuzzy feelings I got when I noticed it on a DVD shopping expedition back in the December sales. Considering that this movie is approaching its thirtieth anniversary, is Encino Man still funny? Well its not a laugh riot, but there is still some fairly scenes most notably the learn to drive scene and Link’s use of high school level Spanish in the bar.
Pauly Shore pretty much gave the kind of performance that you would have expected from him in the 90’s, while watching this I thought to myself that it would have been a nice touch by the filmmakers to give Shore’s character Stoney subtitles. Sean Astin really did not bring anything special to his role, but that is probably because the role of David was so average you could have swapped Astin with almost any other young male actor at the time. I actually enjoyed Fraiser’s performance as Link mainly because it was such a fun and expressive role and even though this might not be the most memorable movie it’s probably one of Fraiser’s more memorable roles and I thought it was kind of cool that the role lived on into other movies.