The Gods Must Be Crazy is what might have happened if Benny Hill had directed Shaka Zulu; a pleasurably surreal waste of 109 minutes.
The film tells the story of... blah, blah, blah - that's what IMDB and Netflix are for, look it up there if you really want to know. What I want to get to is this - the documentary in the extras section of this DVD is perhaps the worst documentary ever made.
Inter
viewing the aging N!xau in his native Ungwatsi language, the unnamed documentarian has the foresight to bring along a translator. Well you would wouldn't you? There, however, the foresight ends. Despite having the translator in many shots talking directly with N!xau, the director (who may or may not be Jamie Uys?) fails to provide the viewer with any translation of N!xau's dialogue. What we are left with is 20 minutes of a guy speaking in a fairly rare African tribal language; an excellent example of how not to make a foreign language documentary.
Now, I did say "perhaps the worst documentary," because, of course, we can't forget Zoo.
Produced by Charles Mudede and Robinson Devor, Zoo is a "documentary" on the life and death of Kenneth Pinyan who died of peritonitis due to a perforation of the colon after engaging in receptive anal sex with a horse. Mudede's intentions are unclear in this film, what he achieves is a disturbing dialogue which, perhaps inadvertently, condones having sex with horses. Zoo is so bad it doesn't really count as documentary, more a deeply Freudian and highly disturbing permission for beastiality: the most reprehensible of all perversions.
Time Magazine review of Zoo by Rebecca Winters Keegan