The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980)

By Peter McGinn

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..