Several
years ago I attended a panel which though wasn’t about film did have as one of
the panelists Jessy Terrero the director of Soul Plane. Needless to say, he
tried to defend his film as being a misunderstood satire. The audience for the
most part wasn’t having it, but he tried anyway.

I think it’s
safe to say that Soul Plane is considered one of the true nadirs of black
cinema. If you squint your eyes and strain hard enough you can kind of see what
they had in mind – a sort of wild satire commenting and upending every black stereotype
that you can think of.  But the film,
about a guy who uses the millions he won in a lawsuit against a flight company to
create his own black airline,  is so poorly written and ineptly directed that it winds doing the exact opposite. That is
reinforcing and celebrating every single negative black stereotype that you can
think of  Even the trailer (below) is
hard to watch

And it
rightly never even achieved any sort of cult status, but instead became the
perfect example how far things had gotten for black cinema from classics such
as Malcolm X to outright disasters such as Soul Plane which came out in 2004. However several of the performers survived the wreck such as Kevin Hart, who no
one would have even imagine would go on a decade later to become one of the biggest comedy movie stars today, Mo’Nique, who went on to win an Oscar and
Snoop Dogg who pretty much can survive anything

However Terrero’s
feature film career was pretty much finished after Soul Plane. His only
other feature film credits so far are a pair of low budget 50 Cent movies back when
Fiddy was cranking out those awful low budget movies with sub-par production
values in his failed attempts to become a film mogul

But I
suppose there must be a demand for the film and it has its defenders since
Olive Films announced yesterday that they will be releasing the film on blu-ray
DVD in June.

And of that
isn’t a reason to finally get a blu-ray player then I don’t know what is.