EVEN before Al Tantay’s
Pakboys: Takusa actually landed on the Upstream streaming service as an entry in this year’s Metro Manila Film Festival, the trailer had already created a furor online for including a joke about transgender people. This led to several LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, queer, etc.) groups to petition the festival to remove the film because of its offensive portrayal of transgenders.
Honestly,
Pakboys’ treatment of transgenders is just one of many reasons this writer thinks that this movie, full of sexist and tired comedic tropes, has no place in 2020.
But what was the story and the joke about? The short of it is that four friends (played by Janno Gibs, Andrew E., Gerald Napoles, and Dennis Padilla) have fun trying to hide their extramarital affairs from their suspicious wives (played by Angelou de Leon, Ana Roces, Maui Taylor, and Marissa Sanchez) while making it look like it’s their wives that cause problems by being too suspicious.