Ek Lief Jou. Ek Lief Kaas. Ek Lief Drank.

There are three scenes from the Kurt Darren starring romantic drama Ek Lief Jou that I will use as keys to discuss the film. I can state up front that the film is badly written and shoddily executed, and unless you’re interested in minor curiosities of contemporary South African cinema, it is best avoided. 

Darren stars as Dirk, a South African singer making it big in Belgium where he promotes a competition for women where the winner will star opposite him in his latest music video. As evidence that films seldom know what journalists really do, a hot reporter, Anna (Ilse de Vis) is assigned to travel to South Africa and to cover the competition. She’s also supposed to find some dirt on Dirk to find a ‘real’ story, something scandalous that her boss (director Ate de Jong) will approve of. Allow me to propose a drinking game: every time Anna says, “I’m a journalist, that’s what I do!”, take a shot. It will improve the viewing experience considerably, and raise it from “unbearable” to just “terrible”. 

It makes sense that we expect Anna and Dirk to fall in love somewhere along the line. What doesn’t make sense if why Dirk, who is devoid of personality but seems like a nice enough (if dim) guy, would be in a relationship with a capitalist succubus played by (former?) model Christina Storm. Also present is Andre Frauenstein, who played Goku in Eternity and now has two dreadful movies under his belt in which he co-stars with Storm. 

Scene 1: The Non-existent Waterfall 

Much of the film is set in a game lodge in Limpopo. At one stage, the characters take to the dirt roads on bicycles, and that’s how Dirk and Anna end up at a nearby waterfall, or as I refer to it, “the small stream spilling over the edge of a hill”. The filmmakers shoot the poor waterfall as if it’s the most irrelevant waterfall in the history of cinema: a small, unimpressive spot in a background so smoothed out and graded during postproduction that the entire background of trees, water and earth blend together like a failed watercolour experiment. It looks like a deleted scene from What Dreams May Come 2: Lovin' Limpopo. 

Scene 2: A Boy and His Bottle

Storm’s character Lisa Snyders and Dirk’s brother Danie have a strange relationship best explained by the psycho-dynamics of sado-masochism. Maybe because she is Dirk’s manager, little brother is willing to act submissive towards Lisa – but only to a point. While at the lodge, Lisa requests some sherry. Danie is initially reluctant to fetch her some but ends up liberating an entire bottle from the bar. He is then witness to something he was not supposed to see that involves Lisa, and to punish her pours out some of the alcohol only to fill the bottle up again with his own urine. He offers some to Lisa, but we know that he doesn’t know that she saw him pee in the sherry. She invites him to help himself to a drink, and watches him gulp down his own piss. It’s a long, bizarre scene, made even stranger by the fact that Danie has to pull his pants down to his knees to enable the bottle-filling to occur. This leads to repeated shots of Frauenstein’s rear, so much so that I began to apprehensively anticipate a reverse full frontal. We were spared that, but not the consumption of urine. 

Scene 3: The Exposed

All the main characters and some secondary ones are involved in a playful touch rugby match. Lisa does not like the fact that Anna seems to have developed a crush on Dirk, and during the game she does something to distract everyone from the Belgian journalist (“It’s what I do!”). In the midst of a line-up, as she is lifted high in the air to catch the ball, Lisa instead pulls down her blouse low enough to flash both breasts. This isn’t just a cleavage moment; for a second, you’re squaring off with the Storm nipples. It’s cheap and gratuitous, an ill-intentioned stunt that was never going to work cinematically, and provides a useful key to the film: Ek Lief Jou forces one badly written, unbearable scene after the other onto you to the point where you cannot believe what you’re seeing, and then you look away disgusted. You look away. 

Ek Lief Jou is a very bad movie, and its title phrase (a low level version of "I love you") is never even used in the film. Nor do we see, for that matter, the music video that the film uses in its premise. Indeed, much in the film is outside the frame, such as some off-screen hyenas that just fuel an already awful performance from Storm as she pretend-panics and pretend-throws rocks at them. Ek Lief Jou tries so hard to be sweet and romantic, and De Vis is likeable enough as a female interest, but in the end there’s not enough liquor (urine-infused or not) in the world to make Ek Lief Jou’s degenerate and undercooked attempts at humour palatable.

Sucked Dry

Less ideologically offensive than “Night Drive” but easily more vacuous and boring, director Christopher-Lee dos Santos’s “Eternity” is a vampire romance so tedious that you begin wishing for the fast paced antics of “The White Ribbon”. I am grateful for “Skoonheid” and “Roepman” and embarrassed for this film. In “Eternity, Andre Frauenstein stars as Billy (the name is a set-up for a terrible joke late in the film; it’s as forced as the character’s hair, which makes him look like a forlorn Goku in search of an Egoli Dragonball), a vampire who spends his evenings parkouring around Johannesburg with his buddies. After one night on the town (its rooftops, staircases etc), it is one of his friends who channels the great philosophers to make the seismic observation: “It is almost daybreak”. I think the rising sun gave him a clue, as it would Billy, but Billy stands there nodding solemnly.

Allow me to pause for a moment. Here are creatures that have obtained immortality and spend their time practising parkour. Something tells me they’re not doing it simply because they’ve already worked their way through the Western literary canon.

Life as a vampire seems uncomplicated enough, until a scientist (poor Ian Roberts, in another of his appearances as Ian Roberts-as-Character X) discovers a formula that could give vampires the ability to walk in direct sunlight without turning to ash. An emergency Vampire Board Meeting is called, where evil Borlak (David James) turns the tables on the more moderate current leader (Gys de Villiers) to become the alpha vamp. This scene exists only so that the film can claim to have a Vampire Board Meeting scene, which most contemporary vampire movies have. With the exception of the Big Bad Borlak, none of the other characters really make a functional appearance ever again. The dialogue throughout the film is ridiculously leaden and generic, but this scene is a particularly effective indicator of what’s to come.

One night, Billy meets Jenny (Rikki Brest) in a night club. May I venture that Brest (now now) was cast for her body, and not her acting abilities or strong verbal presence. If there’s not blood or parkour on the screen, there’s cleavage, and the camera spends minutes on Brest’s body in an early scene where she’s trying on different outfits for her night out. It’s so gratuitous it should be hilarious, but it’s more boring than anything else.

It is Jenny’s birthday, but her mother (Brumilda van Rensburg) does not seem to know about it. So Jesse and Billy celebrate by drinking and dancing. Another pause: Billy drinks blood. When asked what’s in his flask, he says something to the effect of “It’s some kind of Bloody Mary” and then follows up with a Stephanie Meyer-sized clunker: “It’s an acquired taste”. Anyhoo, so the Big Bad Borlak kidnaps Jenny to get his hands in the formula since Ian Roberts-as-Character X is her dad. (By this point - and I may be wrong because at some stage my mind wandered and I started thinking about Del Toro and Hogan’s “The Strain” and Cronin’s superior “The Passage”, which is a sweeping epic featuring vampires – the film reached the halfway mark, and nothing had really happened yet.) Billy and company set off to rescue Jenny and save… Save what? There’s no integration between the worlds of the vampires and the citizens of Johannesburg, so it’s cinematically unclear what precisely is at stake except for some individual fates.

I should mention that Hlomla Dandala co-stars as a policeman, Joe Kau. Dandala is better than this material, and all he does is say his lines, point his gun a lot of times, and appear on the scene when necessary. Model turned actress Christina Storm appears as Billy’s former lover, Lisa, who may be a bit jealous of her ex-boyfriend’s newly acquired mortal girlfriend. Storm, who also recently appeared in a horror of a different nature in “Ek Lief Jou”, is a dreadful actress, plain and simple. She brings only her body to a role that at least demands convincing grunting and groaning. Oh, the noises. These are some of the noisiest vampires I have ever encountered. They hiss and snarl and hiss and snarl and hiss and there I was again, thinking of “The Passage”. It really becomes comical. The blonde female vampire who lugs Jenny around is a particularly inspired hisser.

After the film reveals a big twist - a development even Oedipus would see coming, eyes or no eyes – the film predictably climaxes with a battle, followed by an ending so abrupt and impotent you cannot help but laugh again. “Eternity” is a bloody mess, and proves once more that a bad screenplay results in a bad movie, regardless of how many gunfights or parkour scenes or shots of heaving bosoms you put in.