As lads in the veldt, young Rhino (Ryan Mandelstam) and his native pal Zulu (Bobo Seritsani) play innocently until a racist Afrikaaner teen-ager, Rowena (Marie Van Deventer), captures Rhino's pubescent interest. Years later, Zulu (John Matshikiza), a petty criminal guest of the US penal system, gets deported to his South African homeland. Meanwhile, Rhino (Leon Schuster), who has adopted Tienkie (Michelle Bowes), a child actually fathered by a clueless Zulu, struggles to protect his animal preserve from his ex-wife Rowena (Terri Treas) and her equally bigoted lover, Die Hard (Wilson Dunster).
As founder of an apartheid organization, Die Hard is delighted when he wins an opportunity for a televised $500,000-prize drawing with a scratch-and-win lotto ticket. Unfortunately, he transports new deportee-prisoner Zulu to jail and the wily Zulu pockets the ticket, escaping in a stolen cop car. Zulu is reunited with buddy Rhino whose financial hardship induces him to abet Zulu in gaining the lotto jackpot. Eluding Rowena and Die Hard, with the occasional interference of Tienkie and her new playmate Prince William of England (Skye Svornic), Rhino wins the prize on TV, but an argumentative Zulu tears off half of the check for safekeeping. Disguising themselves as members of the opposite race, a white-faced Zulu and black-faced Rhino crash a neo-Nazi party. Because Tienkie now has Rhino's check fragment, Die Hard and Rowena pilfer Zulu's half, then leave Zulu and Rhino dangling over a precipice. Taunting the prejudicial pair, Tienkie and Prince William pelt greedy Rowena with ostrich eggs and trick her onto a runaway mining car; Die Hard ends up in an alligator pit, a porcupine den, and a bathtub full of flammable material, which gets ignited. With the $500,000 payoff wrenched from defeated Rowena and Die Hard, Zulu reunites with daughter Tienkie, and Rhino saves his beloved wildlife habitat.
Inanely written and directed with the kind of overkill in which the energy level is pitched too high to be enjoyable, YANKEE ZULU takes swipes at racism in a cartoonish manner. While celebrating the prankish dexterity of children, the film plays like a Road Runner cartoon with a political subtext. Despite the nastiness of the villains, this comedy seems genuinely sadistic; the lavish sight gags (and the logistics involved in executing them) don't make this escaspist fare.
Pawns in the director's physical comedy set-pieces, the actors ham it up as if they'd been injected with essence of Jim Carrey. Their strenuous efforts and the movie's laboriously detailed slapstick is more likely to evoke audience murmurs of "That looks like it hurts!" than peals of spontaneous laughter. (Violence, profanity.)" (tvguide.com)
General Information
There's a Zulu on My Stoep is a motion picture produced in the year 1993 as a ZA production. The Film was directed by Gray Hofmeyr, with Michelle Bowes, Wilson Dunster, John Matshikiza, Leon Schuster, , in the leading parts. We have currently no synopsis of this picture on file;Bibliography Filmdienst # 13, 1995, pg 22;
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