Publications
Partners
What it's about:
Shortly before their end of school dance, first team rugby star Werner (Altus Theart) dumps his pretty and popular girlfriend Katrien (Cherie van der Merwe). She makes a bet with her friends that she can get school nerd Wimpie Koekemoer (Ivan Botha) into the first team to replace Werner and teach him a lesson.
What we thought of it:
Cross lowbrow teen comedy American Pie with decades old local TV and the unhappy malformed result will be Bakgat!, proudly showing that SA can compete globally when it comes to producing badly made lowest common denominator aimed crap.
Taking the basic makeover teen movie formula, only applied to a nerdy guy rather than girl, Bakgat! has everything you would expect of a film aimed at 12-year-olds with limited IQs. There is the nerd who builds houses out of matchsticks, the embarrassing parents (ala Jim's dad from American Pie), the sex obsessed friends, and of course the difficult romance. Having one foot in the sports movie camp, there are also a few training montages. All of these are crudely played out with a lack of wit and energy, and there's an annoying level of prudishness which means there aren't even any funny gross-out gags either.
The acting is of the overdone pantomime style usually found in really bad comedy and most of the kids look like they're pushing 30. All it took to transform Wimpie from nerd to sportsman was to ruffle his hair and take off his glasses, but this is as much character development as Bakgat! can muster.
Bakgat! might appeal to boys between the ages of 10 and 14 with limited mental capacity, as long as they're Afrikaans and love rugby more than life. To anyone else with half a brain, it's a lazy, meritless mess that makes awful US comedies seem side-splitting in comparison. Congratulations to the filmmakers for smearing the Vodacom logo over just about everything and failing to include not even a single non-white person in the entire film (not even an extra). Maybe this was acceptable in 1987, but in 2008 it borders on criminal.
- Ivan Sadler
Get published on Channel24! Send us your movie, music and live gig reviews and columns and get published on Channel24. Send your articles to PublishMe@sa.24.com.
Shortly before their end of school dance, first team rugby star Werner (Altus Theart) dumps his pretty and popular girlfriend Katrien (Cherie van der Merwe). She makes a bet with her friends that she can get school nerd Wimpie Koekemoer (Ivan Botha) into the first team to replace Werner and teach him a lesson.
What we thought of it:
Cross lowbrow teen comedy American Pie with decades old local TV and the unhappy malformed result will be Bakgat!, proudly showing that SA can compete globally when it comes to producing badly made lowest common denominator aimed crap.
Taking the basic makeover teen movie formula, only applied to a nerdy guy rather than girl, Bakgat! has everything you would expect of a film aimed at 12-year-olds with limited IQs. There is the nerd who builds houses out of matchsticks, the embarrassing parents (ala Jim's dad from American Pie), the sex obsessed friends, and of course the difficult romance. Having one foot in the sports movie camp, there are also a few training montages. All of these are crudely played out with a lack of wit and energy, and there's an annoying level of prudishness which means there aren't even any funny gross-out gags either.
The acting is of the overdone pantomime style usually found in really bad comedy and most of the kids look like they're pushing 30. All it took to transform Wimpie from nerd to sportsman was to ruffle his hair and take off his glasses, but this is as much character development as Bakgat! can muster.
Bakgat! might appeal to boys between the ages of 10 and 14 with limited mental capacity, as long as they're Afrikaans and love rugby more than life. To anyone else with half a brain, it's a lazy, meritless mess that makes awful US comedies seem side-splitting in comparison. Congratulations to the filmmakers for smearing the Vodacom logo over just about everything and failing to include not even a single non-white person in the entire film (not even an extra). Maybe this was acceptable in 1987, but in 2008 it borders on criminal.
- Ivan Sadler
Get published on Channel24! Send us your movie, music and live gig reviews and columns and get published on Channel24. Send your articles to PublishMe@sa.24.com.
