Casper de Vries at the Pretoria State Theatre. Picture: Gallo Images
Trust Casper de Vries to steal the spotlight just as 2016 comes to an end.
The comedian has had a major resurgence in 2016. Not only did he win the Savannah Comics Choice Lifetime Achievement Award, he took back his domain as a theatre star when he presented his first residency stand-up show at Montecasino during the Pieter Toerien Theatre’s Afrikaans season.
Now, he’s finally dropping a feature film Snaaks Genoeg (Funny Enough), which is marketed as an entertaining, yet poignant, dark comedy.
It stars de Vries as a fictional version of himself.
Snaaks Genoeg is written and directed by David Moore and follows the story of a down-and-out comedian (Casper de Vries) who drifts from one small town to another. Moore says the movie is eccentric with oodles of appeal. “It has been really well received by those who have seen it and we are looking forward to the response from film critics and the public.”
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Having alienated his audiences with his crude comments and offensive humour, de Vries’s character finds that his popularity has faded.
He hits the road, fighting not only for survival but also to find the spark he once had before he was reduced to doing shows in small towns, working for food and accommodation.
As he drifts from a remote location to remote location, he hears that successful comedians are being kidnapped, tortured and murdered in bizarre ways and he seems to be riding right into the epicentre of this inexplicable series of assassinations.
The murders and kidnappings are, in fact, being orchestrated by a lawyer, Koos van der Merwe (Tobie Cronje), who gets clients’ criminal charges dropped in exchange for “sorting out” comedians who offend him and his family’s name.
De Vries has some strange experiences along his journey and all help to make him look at himself and start to reinvent his persona. In the end, de Vries and Cronje come head-to-head in a somewhat unexpected finale. The film is shot in the Tankwa Karoo.
The film also stars Jason Goliath, Sandra Prinsloo, Shaleen Surtie-Richards and Soli Philander. It opens December 30.
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