Encino Man
Two teenagers dig up a frozen caveman while excavating a backyard pool, thaw him out, and enroll him in high school. Brendan Fraser as Link, Sean Astin, and peak "weasel"-era Pauly Shore — critics gave it thumbs down, audiences gave it an A, and every '90s sleepover gave it another run.
Les Mayfield made his directorial debut with Encino Man, a $7 million comedy that opened on May 22, 1992, under the Hollywood Pictures banner. The premise was absurd in exactly the way a kid could pitch from memory: while digging a backyard pool, teenagers Dave Morgan and Stoney Brown discover a frozen caveman, thaw him out, and name him Linkovich "Link" Chomovsky. Link has to navigate the 20th century — high school included — while the two boys discover their prehistoric friend has life lessons of his own to teach. Brendan Fraser played Link, Sean Astin played Dave, and Pauly Shore, in full "weasel"-slang surfer-dude persona, played Stoney.
The film opened to $9.9 million, fourth place for the weekend, and revealed a vast gulf between critics and audiences. Reviewers savaged it — 17% on Rotten Tomatoes, 25/100 on Metacritic, thumbs down from both Siskel and Ebert — and Shore took the brunt, winning the Golden Raspberry for Worst New Star. Audiences told a different story, grading the film an A on CinemaScore, and it went on to gross $40.7 million worldwide against its $7 million budget. The critics were not the ones buying tickets.
Time settled the argument in the audience's favor. Encino Man became a cult classic — a sleepover staple and cable mainstay for '90s kids, endlessly rewatched and endlessly quoted. The premise itself became schoolyard shorthand: what if there was a caveman frozen in your backyard? Thirty years of thawed-out rewatches later, the movie critics buried is the one everybody remembers.
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