Schuck’s Tshabalala’s Survival Guide to South Africa (*½)

Directed by: Gray Hofmeyr

Starring: Leon Schuster, Alfred Ntombela

Seen: June 18th 2010

*½ Out of ****

Leon Schuster built a reputation for being the premier hidden camera gag creator in South Africa during the 70’s and 80’s, and going back to those old Schucks movies it is clearly evident why he deserves this reputation. Those old movies where awesomely funny, and form a part of the South African psyche so deeply entrenched that it forms part of just about everyone in the country’s sense of humour.

Which brings me to Schucks Tshabalala’s Survival Guide to South Africa. Leon Schuster and Alfred Ntombela are once again searching for good hidden camera scenarios in an attempt to make a movie. And that is what the movie is about, their attempts to make a movie. A few good to great sequences are captured, but in a movie that’s supposed to be all about the hidden camera sequences, I was expecting at least three times as many setups. The movie grossly undercuts the good with ridiculously badly setup in-between scenes. When Leon Schuster is not in some elaborate disguise as either an obese Dutch reporter or an obese black police woman or an obese (theme here?) informal settler on Mouille Point in Cape Town, he spends the bulk of the movie as Schucks Tshabalala, a black tour operator taking a group of (extremely terribly realised fake) tourists through Cape Town and answering their questions about South Africa either by way of a lame joke or by one of the rare actual hidden camera scenes.

The acting in the movie is even worse than what should realistically be expected from this type of movie, with the actors used to portray different nationalities delivering accents that are shockingly bad in their simple ignorance of how they should actually sound. One thing that did register with me is how, before being made aware of the fact that this is a hidden camera scene, many white South Africans seem to have undergone absolutely NO change since the abolishment of apartheid. They are still stubborn as hell, one ex-Springbok rugby player refusing to address one of Leon Schuster’s alter egos, a black Zimbabwean who only understands English, in any language other than his precious Afrikaans. Now I am Afrikaans, but there should be a level of human respect, and it angers me to see such stubborn and obnoxious behaviour from a member of the supposedly free Afrikaner race. I am an Afrikaner myself and I do not appreciate the stereotype that is being perpetuated by this presentation.

Back to the movie – this is the last time ever I’ve been duped into seeing anything made by Leon Schuster, as I’ve only rarely seen anything this bad on the big screen. Luckily there are a few short hidden camera scenes that make things partially worthwhile, but even in some of them there seems to be an element of dishonesty, almost as if they were orchestrated/acted rather than just allowed to play out as they actually should. Schucks Tshabalala’s Survival Guide to South Africa is terrible, lowest common denominator entertainment, if it could be called that…