I don’t know where to start. I do not know where to start. Let’s get the synopsis out of the way: Loqueesha (Amazon Prime Video, for some reason, streaming now) sees Jeremy Saville as Joe, a down-on-his-luck bartender who is really good at advice but can’t get his dream job as a late-night call-in agony aunt because – and this is what the movie is saying, not me – because he is white. Actual line, said aloud, to nobody: “Ah, they want black women and minorities. They don’t want a white guy like me!”
The ensuing plot device is one of the more offensive in history: Joe re-records his audition tape as Loqueesha, a monstrous pantomime of a black woman’s voice, submits anonymously, finds great success and huge fame. A real film would end with – oh, I don’t know, this completely crashing down? Him in jail? – but I think this is a film made to fulfil a bet made at a Klan members’ barbecue, so instead he thrives and succeeds.
Too much to even mention, but some notes: the literal opening line of this film is a guy in a bar saying: “… and I have to put on this monkey suit … every single day!” Every single supporting character who endorses Joe’s scheme has deliberately been cast as a PoC, including his love interest who, in the film’s penultimate scene, finally calls him out for being racist and sexist (the first time this concept has been introduced to the film audience!) then, bafflingly, kisses him.
This film is so badly made – I don’t think there was a lighting guy, because the actors variously flush purple, green and blue depending on the ambient light around them; the sound guy, if he exists, apparently recorded the audio on a piece of string tied to a tin can – it’s so badly made that in three separate scenes (THREE SCENES!) Saville has visible food on his chin; there is a section where a newsreader’s mouth briefly flips upside down because they clearly had to overdub it in post and the remaining VFX budget was, basically, “After Effects 30-day trial”.
The Reason You Haven’t Seen Any Of These Actors In Anything Ever Before Is Because They Belong In The Hague. A distraught bridge jumper is used as a plot point so clumsily that I think it technically breaks media law. Joe at no point learns a lesson in this movie and, in fact, there’s a complicated setup where he teaches a black woman a morality tale about race, one of many moments where you pause and yell, to no one: “WHO IS THIS FILM FOR?????” Loqueesha’s advice is supposed to be clever and funny and it is consistently neither. Joe is cast as “the smart guy” in every scene so there’s literally no journey because he’s never wrong. And the ending sees the entire city learn that Loqueesha is actually a white man, and they choose to forgive him.
I hold everyone who had a hand in this personally responsible. I hold whoever rented the 4K cameras to Jeremy Saville personally responsible. Camera-hire companies should have to see scripts before they give their equipment out! They should be up in court, too! The worst film ever made. The worst film ever made. Worse than The Room, in every way. The one-star rating it currently has on IMDb is actively generous. I cannot believe this film got made.
