FILM

Delete This Film: "Loqueesha" Is Genuinely the Worst Movie I've Ever Watched

I hated "Loqueesha" from the very depths of my soul.

Within film history's canon of exceptionally bad movies, I'm confident I've seen most of them.

I love to watch people's earnest attempts to create art fail spectacularly, and I might even argue that sometimes "bad art" speaks to the human condition better than "good art." So when I saw the trailer for Loqueesha, I knew I'd end up watching it like a goat consuming trash. Let me tell you, I was wholly unprepared.

Loqueesha is a glimpse into what race relations look like from the perspective of a raving lunatic. This is obvious from the title, Loqueesha, which the white director claims "goes beyond race and gender." Jeremy Saville, best known for his role as Husband in the Modern Family episode "Basketball," didn't just direct Loqueesha; he wrote it, produced it, cast it, and, of course, starred in it. To call Jeremey Saville misguided would be an affront to the very concept of direction. One can only surmise that Saville subsists on his deep-seated, gnawing feeling that his career would have taken off by now if only he weren't a straight white man. Saville is a sentient caricature of a racist who doesn't realize he's a racist. He pays minorities to affirm he's not racist—which is aggressively racist.

Watching Loqueesha doesn't feel like watching a "bad movie" so much as it feels like watching a series of hate crimes unfold in slow motion. It's a visceral experience. During every scene, I felt compelled to shake Jeremy Saville and scream, "WHAT THE F**K ARE YOU DOING?" in his face until my voice gave out and my words turned into spurts of vomit. I hated this movie with every ounce of my being. I hated it audibly, alone in my apartment. Part of me is convinced that I fever-dreamed the entire thing, except I don't think my brain is capable of the degree of racism required for such a feat.

The plot, for lack of a better term, follows a man named Joe who, oh God, I want to punch him in the mouth so badly. His primary character trait is being an arrogant waste of air who always thinks he's right, and he uses his bartending job as an opportunity to dole out unasked for "advice" to drunk people. His advice is so generic that Garfield would find it hackneyed ("I gotta be me. Otherwise, who else is gonna do it?"), but for some reason, all his patrons regard him as a wise sage. One of them, a black woman named Rachel (I mention her race because Jeremy Saville so clearly made all the characters around his character black in order to shield himself from accusations of racism), falls for him after he calls her a "f**king idiot" and does a racist Indian impression for her. She then suggests that he applies for a job as a talk radio host with the sole description: "Minorities and women encouraged to apply."

Joe does it, because he needs money to put his son through "gifted school." Foreseeably, because this movie is made by an unbelievable racist, Joe is rejected solely due to his whiteness, even though he is oh-so-qualified-and-deserving. So he reapplies as a sassy black woman named Loqueesha and, would you believe it, he gets the job! Joe's affected "Loqueesha Voice" would best be described as the purest, most unadulterated essence of racism in audio form, and Joe makes exaggerated duckfaces the whole time he does it. I don't know how a person comes back from doing that. Frankly, I don't think they do.

Joe hires a black man named Mason to be the Loqueesha radio show's producer, and share in and justify the secret that Loqueesha is, in reality, a white man. Sure enough, everyone loves Loqueesha, and because the show is so wildly successful, they need to hire a real black woman to be the face of the operation. So they hire a black actress named Renee, and she ends upbeing the villain.

Yes, Renee attempts to extort Joe, ultimately taking over the show but failing miserably at the job, because she's a horrible monster who can't give black woman advice like a white man. I promise these are not my sentiments. After falling flat on her face and sullying the Loqueesha brand, she returns to Joe and tells him that he is "a better black woman than I am." This was the most degrading, painful thing I've ever watched in my life, because Mara Hall, the actress who played Renee, could not have possibly been paid enough to subject herself to that, even if it was for all the money in the world, and I'm one hundred percent sure it was not.

In the end, Joe outs himself as Loqueesha. He's immediately forgiven by everyone, including his black love interest Rachel. She very briefly calls him racist and sexist but then rewards him with sex. This proves that being a terrible person is okay as long as you are Jeremy Saville and can pay desperate actors to validate your awfulness. Ultimately, Joe learns nothing and succeeds in every measurable capacity, maintaining his Loqueesha show and presumably going on to normalize minstrel shows in general.

Everything in this movie is horrendous. The acting is brutal to watch, hacky and wooden. Jeremy Saville thinks two people reciting bad quips at one another constitutes dialogue. For some reason, there are like thirty gay/transgender jokes in the movie. Not one of them is funny; plus, they made me remember another homophobic thing I heard earlier today, and I'm counting that against it, too. The audio isn't properly synced. The lighting is either too bright or urine-yellow. Also, Joe's son in the movie is the worst child actor I've ever seen, and normally I wouldn't target a kid but f**k him, he and his deluded stage parents are complicit. Truly, absolutely every last detail of this movie is awful.

But worst of all, the astounding part is that this movie doesn't understand how racist it is. Sure, it has characters call out the "racism" every now and then, but they always let it pass and, worse, reward it. In essence, Loqueesha is a movie that rewards racist stereotypes as "just telling the truth!" This movie is grotesque. This movie is abhorrent. This movie is criminal.

Every single person involved should issue a public apology for making the world a worse place. I hold everyone involved fully responsible, including anyone who has ever met Jeremy Saville and not told him that his ideas are garbage and he should never, ever say them to anyone else, ever. I also hold Amazon directly responsible for allowing this movie on their platform, and honestly, this might be the necessary incentive to burn their soulless corporation to the ground. Delete this film.