The Gods Must Be Crazy 1980

The critics are raving... the natives are restless... and the laughter is non-stop!

7.233 / 10   1084 vote(s)
PG
Action Comedy

A Coca-Cola bottle dropped from an airplane raises havoc among a normally peaceful tribe of African bushmen who believe it to be a utensil of the gods.

Release Date 1980-09-10
Runtime 1h 49m
Directors Buster Reynolds, Jamie Uys, Robert Lewis, Kobus Kruger, Jamie Uys
Producers Jamie Uys, Boet Troskie
Writer Jamie Uys

This is another one of those older movies my wife and I watched together over twenty years ago, and then recently watched again. We enjoyed it just as much as we did the first time. I had forgotten a lot of the details, so that was actually a good thing as it wasn’t overly familiar to me, like watching Groundhog Day yet again would be.

The tag line suggests that the laughs never stop, but that isn’t quite accurate. There are a lot of laugh out loud moments, mostly physical humor, and plenty of pockets of humor here and there, but there are also connecting scenes that set up the plot lines and transition from one to another. There are three main plots that thread together and keep the viewers on their toes.

The writer/director apparently put in months of long days without a break putting this together, and his effort was rightly rewarded with great success at the box office. Oddly enough, I didn’t recognize any of his other work, except for the more tepid sequel to this modern classic comedy..

Peter McGinn