Loqueesha Fucking Wrecked Me
Even though I spent eighteen years as a professional film critic, people rarely, if ever, email me or message me to tell me that there’s a great new movie out that I need to see or write about. The same holds true of great books, television and music even though I similarly spent decades as a book, television and music critic for The A.V Club.
No, when people think there’s something in pop culture I absolutely MUST see and then write about it’s almost invariably a movie so abysmal-looking it’s hard to believe that it actually exists.
When the Loqueesha trailer became the talk of the internet, for example, multiple people contacted me to let me know of its existence. Loqueesha resides squarely in my sweet spot and pretty much only in my sweet spot. I am inveterately fascinated by narcissism wedded to a complete lack of self-awareness and self-consciousness as well as the sometimes hilarious, sometimes tragic gulf between how maniacal egotists see themselves and who they actually are.
Loqueesha is a work of profound, albeit unintentional racism and sexism but even more than that it is a work of overwhelming narcissism. The film’s narcissism is inveterately rooted in racism and sexism, in Loqueesha’s writer-director-star Jeremy Saville genuinely seeming to believe that his crass caricature of a sassy, insult and wisecrack-slinging black woman is morally superior and somehow more authentic and true than the blackness of the film’s actual black characters, particularly the woman his character hires to play the role of Loqueesha in public who fatally lacks the soul, heart and insight into the human condition of Loqueesha when played by a white man.
People adorably warned me that I shouldn’t watch Loqueesha because it was really bad. Here’s the thing: I was put on earth to watch Loqueesha and write about Loqueesha and wrestle for entire days with the monstrosity that is Loqueesha. It’s my goddamn existential destiny. It’s what I do. It’s why I’m able to hold onto a career in pop culture media.
I didn’t just need to see Loqueesha. I needed to do a deep dive into everything Loqueesha-related so I checked out Saville and Loqueesha’s equally pathetic Twitter feeds, watched and then wrote about Saville’s debut The Test for My World of Flops and this website. Yes, I retroactively made The Test a My World of Flops piece, because I can and that fucker sure ain’t a success.
But it took me some time to ramp up the energy to actually watch and write about Loqueesha, partially because I was hoping it would get a Zero rating on Rotten Tomatoes so I could write about it for my The Zeros column at Rotten Tomatoes.
At a certain point, however, I realized that since it’s available for free on Amazon, and also no one in their right mind would want to publicly support Loqueesha, it’s doubtful it will receive enough of a theatrical release to qualify for the column.
So I decided I would write about Loqueesha for this website and My World of Flops, in part because no one else seems to be writing about it. That seems like an enormous missed opportunity. Here’s a film that everyone is talking about, yet it’s going suspiciously uncovered on sites aghast at its very existence.
Then I started to watch Loqueesha and suddenly things started to make a lot more sense. People weren’t writing about Loqueesha because they don’t need to, in that it’s not a new theatrical release that must be covered but also because it’s a fucking brutal endurance test even for people who have devoted their entire professional lives to bad movies, as I have.
It took me maybe five hours to make it through the 98 endless minutes of Loqueesha because I had to constantly stop to note some unconscionable, unforgivable, inconceivable offense the film committed. You could easily do a Loqueesha by the minute podcast because literally every thirty seconds something happens so horrifying and wrong it must be documented for posterity as a crime against not just cinema but humanity.
Loqueesha is the longest My World of Flops entry by far. It had to be. I wasn’t just writing up an unusually offensive, terrible movie, I was purging myself of the awful experience of watching Loqueesha. I didn’t just need to write about Loqueesha at an unprecedented length; I needed to get it out of my system.
Usually watching and writing about bad movies is no big deal for me. My brain and body are conditioned to endure the very worst cinema has to offer but Loqueesha tested me, it really did, so if you are thinking about watching Loqueesha yourself, don’t. Just don’t. I pretty much HAD to see it and I barely survived the experience. Read my article, look at the screen shots in horror and be glad you’re not me, because I have to do these things, while you have the wonderful option of avoiding this unnecessary cinematic torture.
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