Cavemen Zed (Jack Black, left) and Oh (Michael Cera) take a trip into Biblical times after being banished from their tribe in the comedy Year One. (Columbia Pictures)

Last year, we were treated to 10,000 B.C., a caveman adventure that was unintentionally laughable. Now we have Year One, a caveman comedy sorely in need of more yuks.

This movie should’ve been comic gold. Year One is a collaboration between writer-director Harold Ramis, the dean of smart/crude comedies (Animal House, Caddyshack), and his spiritual offspring, the young hotshots of the Apatow film factory. Add to that the irresistible Laurel-and-Hardy team of wild man Jack Black and fumbling adolescent Michael Cera, which is sort of like pairing the Tasmanian Devil with the Poky Little Puppy. Sadly, the only thing that’s gold here is Cera — and I mean that literally. The poor guy ends up getting gilded head to toe by an industrious eunuch and looking like a sad refugee from Federico Fellini’s Satyricon.

Year One starts off with a Stone Age scenario and then abruptly shifts into a half-baked biblical satire that owes way too much to Monty Python's Life of Brian.

Wait a minute, you say. Eunuch? Satyricon? What kind of caveman movie is this? The answer: a very confused one. Year One starts off with the expected Stone Age scenario and then abruptly shifts into a half-baked biblical satire that owes way too much to Monty Python’s Life of Brian. Ramis doesn’t seem to know what kind of movie he’s trying to make, and at times it feels like one long, improvised sketch. Only the considerable talents of his cast — and an occasional glimmer of Ramis’s old wit — save it from being a bust.

Black and Cera play Zed and Oh, respectively, members of a primitive forest-dwelling tribe. Zed’s an incompetent hunter who provides more bluster than boar meat; Oh’s a gatherer, relegated to collecting berries for the nightly fruit salad. The early scenes are dismally weak, relying on the same articulate-Neanderthal shtick as the GEICO Cavemen commercials. Ramis and his co-writers (The Office’s Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg) even stoop to a feces-tasting gag — and “gag” is the right word. (At that point, you may become nostalgic for the sophisticated humour of Ringo Starr’s Caveman.)

After Zed eats a forbidden apple from the Tree of Knowledge, he’s banished from the tribe. He and Oh wander off and soon find themselves in the Book of Genesis. They run into quarrelling siblings Cain (David Cross) and Abel (Paul Rudd), then save bratty teenager Isaac (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) from being sacrificed by Abraham (Hank Azaria). Azaria gives the film’s first funny cameo performance, as a patriarch a little too keen on circumcision.

When our two cavemen arrive at the “twin cities” of Sodom and Gomorrah, things finally start to pick up. Sodom (“Where the sinners are winners”) is an Old Testament Vegas. “What transpires within the confines of the walls of Sodom, stays within the confines of the walls of Sodom,” Cross’s Cain says. Ah, biblical humour!

Still, the movie is much livelier when it becomes a sword-and-sandals spoof, with Zed and Oh as bumbling soldiers one minute and grovelling slaves the next. (By then, you’ll have stopped following the slipshod plot.) There’s a hilarious send-up of the homoerotic bath scene from Spartacus, when Cera’s timid Oh is forced to rub oil on a campy high priest (Oliver Platt) with a shag carpet of chest hair. And when Zed poses as an arrogant centurion, pretending to bawl out a servant girl, Black briefly lets rip with his trademark over-the-top intensity — something the movie could use a lot more of.

Zed (Jack Black, left) and Eema (Juno Temple, centre) discover a gilded Oh (Michael Cera) in the film Year One. (Columbia Pictures)

During all this, Zed is supposed to be undergoing some kind of enlightenment courtesy of the forbidden fruit, leading eventually to a Life of Brian-type revelation. There are also a couple of cavegirls in the mix for romantic interest: June Diane Raphael as Maya, Zed’s hairy-armpit-flaunting heartthrob, and Juno Temple as Eema, the prehistoric pubescent who Oh worships from afar. The Sodomites have recruited them as sacrificial virgins and the boys must come to their rescue.

In his pre-fame days, Ramis played straight man to the manic John Belushi at Chicago’s Second City. He might have been thinking of that when he paired the nerdy Cera with Black, the closest thing we have to a Belushi these days. The two actors don’t really click as a team — although Black is an improvement over the unfunny Jonah Hill, Cera’s pal in Superbad. They are both at their best on their own: Black making outrageous overtures to Sodom’s dishy princess (Angelina Jolie lookalike Olivia Wilde) and Cera doing his sweet, shy bit with Temple.

Their co-stars are hit and miss. Platt’s screaming queen of a high priest, with more eye makeup than Tammy Faye Bakker, is a hoot. As Isaac, Mintz-Plasse does his still-amusing McLovin persona from Superbad. However, Cross (the sexually disoriented Tobias of Arrested Development) is disappointing as Cain, in part because his skit with Rudd’s Abel is so badly written.

Ramis’s direction is as lax as his screenplay, and at times, the editing is atrocious. If he wanted to evoke the comedies of the late ’70s and early ’80s, Ramis has succeeded — but not quite the way he intended. In the end, Year One doesn’t resemble Life of Brian but rather Wholly Moses!, that lame Life of Brian rip-off from 1980 starring Dudley Moore. You’ve never heard of Wholly Moses? Don’t worry: Two decades from now, no one will remember Year One, either.

Year One opens Friday, June 19.

Martin Morrow writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.