This movie is not a big budget action film, this movie is not an emotional soap opera, or a tearjerker, this is a simple little film about the simple things in life. This South African produced film has proven to be one of the best I have seen in quite a long time. N!xau, a native bushman plays a bushman in this movie. A coke bottle has destroyed his villages life as it has been proven to be an excellent tool, but everyone wants it. So the young Bushman is told by the village elders to throw the ‘evil thing' off the ends of the earth.

 

On his long and perilous journey he runs into all kinds of different people, some terrorists, a man studying animals, an uptight urban teacher, and some trouble along the way, obviously. The movie is just so funny, the film is told from the point of view of the bushman, and is poignant as well. The movie manages to be very different, and extremely unconventional, at least by American standards. 

 

I have to admit I am glad I got to see this movie. A lot of great foreign films do not make it over to America, and that is sad, but this movie is excellent, it is funny, sweet, and all around one of the best movies I have seen. The writing is congruent and sharp, the performances do not at all seemed forced and the ensemble here manage to come off appropriately hilarious without taking away from the plot.

 

There are some political overtones here as well, as the movie takes a few shots at apartheid when it was still around. Also in my mind the movie is extremely satirical of the instability that the region faces. The funniest part of the movie were the terrorists. They were so incredibly inept and silly I couldn't help laugh at them. If they weren't tripping over closing doors they were tripping over themselves.

 

Marius Weyers as the biologist who is clumsy but well meaning also steals the show, and his assistant, played by Louw Verway is excellent, but the real star of the show is N!Xau, who makes such an excellent lead and does wonderful here. What amazes me about him was he was about forty when he did this film. There is no way for him to know when he was born, but the man looks so youthful, it is incredible, I thought he was a teenager! Shows you how much I know. Anyway see this incredible film, it is more than worth it.

 

 

What starts out as a simple tale of the bush turns into a wild adventure with a coke bottle, revolutionaries, a dis-enchanted office worker turned teacher, and a scientist who studies animal dung with no skills around women. Add a smart-tongued mechanic and a 4x4 called the antichrist, and you have one of the funniest movies ever to come out of South Africa. You laugh as much at the ludicrous nature of some of the situations as much as what they want you to laugh at. You may never look at Africa the same again.

 

 

 

I remember the first 5 times I saw this movie I was laughing so much that tears rolled down my face. This movie was very well done and I have nothing bad to say about this movie. I definetly recommend this movie to anyone who wants to laugh.... and if it doesn't make you laugh then you better check your pulse.

 

 

 

 

It seemed simplistic, yet it was so brilliant in its execution that it ranks as one of the more interesting films of the last century. Unique and different, this film showed a different side of Africa and introduced one of the few genuine characters in the African Bushman. Highly recommended for anyone who has not seen this film. If you can find it, rent it.

 

 

This is not a great movie but it uses the differences between the civilized white man against the uncivilized Bushman and with that simple tool it becomes hilarious. Civilized in the white man's eyes,I must add to that.This is one of those movies where every gag works,no matter how simple and silly it is. Most of the time the movie is slapstick comedy the way we see it in Chaplin- or Laurel & Hardy-shorts. We even have the fast forward sequence where people are running away from something.

 

The movie opens with a look on the Bushmen and a narrator (Paddy O'Byrne) tells us what kind of people they are; friendly and without any knowledge about the world not that far from their Kalahari desert. When they see a plane they think it is a strange bird or even a god. One day a pilot throws a glass bottle out of his airplane and the thing is found by the Bushmen. They have never seen anything that is a smooth and hard as this object and they find it very useful. They think it is a gift from the gods.

The problem is that the gods have given only one object and for the first time they have to share something that is very hard to share. For the first time they feel emotions such as anger and jealousy. It is decided that the thing is an Evil Thing and must be thrown of the earth and Xixo (N!xau, a real Bushman) is the one to do that. These early scenes give a very funny view on how the civilized white man has become what he is today.

 

In the meanwhile we have met Andrew Steyn (Marius Weyers) who does field research not far from the Bushman and Kate Thompson (Sandra Prinsloo) who was tired of her job and now wants to do something with children in Botswana. Steyn must pick up Kate and bring her to the village and this is where the slapstick begins. Steyn is a man who gets very nervous when is around women and with Kate he must be the most clumsy guy there is.

We have also met Sam Boga (Louw Verwey) who wants to do a coup but fails and he is now running for the police. We know how all these stories will come together but that is not a bad thing. It only uses the story to show us differences between people, to show that the white man is not necessarily the civilized man and it does this with great comedy. 

 

‘The Gods Must Be Crazy' with its simple humor works a lot better then most of the modern comedies. The way the Bushmen talk is funny enough to like this movie. Fortunately there is so much more including a little message.

 

 

 

I don't know that I've ever seen a movie that had such innocent joy - I'm not sure if any other movie I've seen had any innocent joy, for that matter.Perhaps what true joy I've seen in movies is civilized and therefore self-conscious.

 

Anyway, you can look at the crazy civilized world through the eyes of these innocents and have joy about it instead of cynicism. Can ordinary pain relievers do that?The premise is how one empty Coke bottle in the garden of Eden could corrupt it. They do a totally believable job of it, too.

 

Lots of laughs, kids loved it. I saw it in the theaters in the mid-80's and am glad I saw it again. You'll like it. It will lighten your heart.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Crazy, goofy, and silly are the three most operative words to describe "The Gods Must Be Crazy". But the movie is also very original. It's appropriate that the word crazy is in the title because this is the craziest movie I've ever seen. "The Gods Must Be Crazy" is a South African made comedy that was made back in the early 1980s but didn't get released until 3-4 years after shooting was completed. It became a surprise hit in the U.S. after it was released in 1984, and it did very well in other countries too.

"The Gods Must Be Crazy" features three separate stories that get tied together towards the end. One story is about a bushman who goes on a journey to return a Coke bottle that he found to the Gods after the bottle starts causing harm to some of his family members. Another story revolves around a war that breaks out in Central Africa. And the other story centers around a clumsy scientist who tries to take a pretty South African woman to her new job as a schoolteacher in a small African village, and does everything wrong. This is my favorite part of the movie. The scientist is played by Marius Weyers, and he gives an inspired slapstick comedy performance. 

 

Some of the things that he does in the film had me exploding in laughter. The scenes with the jeep that he drives are priceless. Sandra Prinsloo is a good foil as the schoolteacher who unfortuneitly has no choice but to put up with his clumsiness. When Weyers and Prinsloo are on screen, "The Gods Must Be Crazy" is at its funniest. 

 

The other two stories are good, but not great. Nevertheless, there are some unusual scenes in these parts of the movie too. But the scenes involving the scientist and the schoolteacher are the best parts of "The Gods Must Be Crazy". It's too bad that they didn't turn up in the dull sequel. I think these parts of the movie alone is enough for me to recommend "The Gods Must Be Crazy". *** (out of four)

 

 

-Didn't receive a major U.S. release until 1984. 

 

-Sandra Prinsloo had a strong Afrikaans accent in the original soundtrack and her voice was dubbed by an American actress for the US release of the film. 

 

-Biggest foreign box office hit during its release. 

 

-Was banned shortly after release in Trinidad and Tobago following protests from pressure groups that claimed it was racist. 

 

-The film was made by a South African director and was financed with South African government funds, but was released as a Botswanan film because there was a hard 

international embargo against South Africa. 

 

-Ran for 532 consecutive days at the Oaks Theaters in Cupertino, California. It was pulled only because the film reels they used fell into disrepair and a large section caught fire. After such a long run, it was simply cost prohibitive to have the reels replaced, but the record still stands as the longest uninterrupted run of any movie in Northern California. 

 

-Picked up by the midnight movie circuit shortly after its initial release. 

 

-N!xau was paid less than $2000 for his role as Xi, even though the film grossed over $100 million worldwide. Before his death in 1996, Jamie Uys supplemented this with an additional $20,000 as well as a monthly stipend 

 

-The films' depictions of the Bushmen, even if they were superficially accurate in the decades before the rapid social changes of the 1970s and 1980s, are clearly no longer accurate. The DVD's special feature "Journey to Nyae Nyae" (N!xau's homeland in northeastern Namibia), filmed in 2003, demonstrates this. 

 

-Director Jamie Uys appears in this film as the Reverend. 

 

-In the final scenes of the film, Xi throws the bottle over a cliff. This scene was filmed at God's Window, a site located at the edge of the escarpment between the Highveld and Lowveld, in the province of Mpumalanga, South Africa.