User Reviews

FISHY STONES is another South African film made for black audiences, featuring popular stars like Innocent 'Popo' Gumede and Hector Manthanda. The story is about a couple of bumbling thieves who are introduced in a car chase. They've just stolen a stash of priceless diamonds and are being pursued by the police, so they decide to hide the diamonds in the bush and come back to them later. Unfortunately for them, a group of local campers might just get there first...

The story has shades of classic British comedy films like THE BIG JOB although obviously this is a far more basic kind of story. The acting is adequate and little use is made of some of the fantastic locations that the crew obviously had access to. Where FISHY STONES does stand out is in the enhanced level of comedy in the story; there's plenty of humour here, a lot of it stemming from the dumb sidekick character, and it does work and lifts the story out of the doldrums somewhat.

First, some history: FISHY STONES and other Zulu B-Movies were created during apartheid in South Africa. The B-Scheme was a subsidy system set up by white South Africans to create movies with black crews and black audiences. In this particular case, the director, Tonie van der Merwe, never actually opposed apartheid (and was upset by it's eventual outcome). He was simply tapping into an unexploited market: "You didn't have to be a rocket scientist to know that was the market of the future." But it was a rare thing for these audiences to see movies that portrayed black South Africans as heroes, or even as normal people and not something other.

The movie itself is not very good. It's a fairly lighthearted affair, a comic "thriller" with two bumbling criminals. Camera work is uninspired and although the locations are beautiful, they aren't used much. The writing is hamfisted; every character says out loud what he is thinking, and then he repeats it. Certain scenes seem entirely ad-libbed, and one scene in particular sees one of the criminals apparently stalling for time to remember what he's supposed to do (the finger snapping part, if you've seen it -- of course, I can't be certain that's really what was going on). It's wonderfully goofy -- so is the music: jazz-rock/disco muzak completely unrelated to what's happening on screen throughout all of the film. The low budget that the film was made with pervades it; see the interior of the criminals' car early on -- reminiscent of the plane's cockpit from Ed Wood's PLAN 9.

Expect something asinine if you watch it. Go into it with the same mindset that you'd watch a cheesy 80's action flick with. It's not good but it's not boring.

See: ONISHI, NORIMITSU. "Honoring a Filmmaker in the Shadow of Apartheid". New York Times.

"Fishy Stones" belongs to a specific breed of films produced in South Africa at the height of Apartheid and aimed specifically at black African audiences. These were cheap genre pictures that blatantly stole from the kinds of movies that the 'lesser' American studios were turning out at the time; in America "Fishy Stones" would have been considered a Z-movie.

It's a crime caper or a crime 'comedy' with a small cast and frankly, very little in the way of comedy. The director was Tonie van der Merwe who handles the pre-credit chase sequence with some aplomb but very little else. The credits themselves are literally typed up for us on an old typewriter so you can see where the budget went or, in this case, didn't go. Terrible in every respect.