Encino Man

Two California teens dig a hole in the backyard looking for a swimming pool and instead unearth a frozen Neanderthal, thaw him out with a hair dryer, and enroll him in high school. It works about as well as you'd expect. Brendan Fraser grunts his way through his big-screen debut as "Link," Pauly Shore is somehow the film's moral center, and Sean Astin plays a guy who just wants everyone to respect the Pleistocene. We dig into the movie's truly deranged internal logic (nobody calls the Smithsonian?), the early-90s obsession with turning "weird outsider" into "coolest kid at school" in under 90 minutes, and whether this counts as anthropology if you squint hard enough. Bring your own hair dryer.

How will Encino Man hold up?

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Here are the film credits for Encino Man (1992):

Director: Les Mayfield

Cast:

• Sean Astin as Dave Morgan
• Brendan Fraser as Link (Linkovitch Chomofsky)
• Pauly Shore as Stanley "Stoney" Brown
• Megan Ward as Robyn Sweeney
• Robin Tunney as Ella
• Michael DeLuise as Matt Wilson
• Mariette Hartley as Joan Morgan
• Richard Masur as Ed Morgan
• Rick Ducommun as Mr. Morris