Promiscuously Toxic: Movie Review

TW: Abuse, CSA, Childhood Trauma, Violence

So I was scrolling through Tubi last week and I happened to come across this movie called Promiscuously Toxic. I figured it would be entertaining like other modern urban dramas on the platform, but I was not expecting what I got.

(I forgot all of the characters’ names except the main character, Marcus and his “karma” Angel/Shay, but I’ll try to explain everything to the best of my ability. If you don’t like spoilers, stop reading now.)

So the story opens with Marcus as the background narrator. He’s talking about how his life is pretty much made: he’s a drug lord and has a “Bad B” (girl in the blue dress) who he’s seen with in the opening scene. She complains about how she wants more from him, but he basically beats around the bush and won’t define the relationship. Come to find out, he can’t define the relationship because he has another woman that lives in his house (girl in the white dress)… ! So apparently, he’s in a relationship with Red Locs, and Bad B is his side chick that he takes on luxury vacations?

Anywho, the plot thickens when his “brother” (who is actually his lifetime best friend from childhood) decides to get a new distributor and the new distributor is Angel, who now goes by Shay. When she was Angel back in the day, Marcus did her dirty, and for some reason, he has a renewed interest in her since she resurfaced. Long story short, they do start hooking up after she briefly gives him a hard time, and after one meet up in the park, he learns that he has a son… with Angel/Shay.

So at that point, he decides he wants to “right his wrongs” and marry Angel/Shay while leaving the drug game behind, but things quickly go left when Angel/Shay’s husband (who her son calls “dad”) gets out of prison and it’s revealed that Angel/Shay was actually a plant; Marcus’s brother set up a scheme to get Marcus to quit the drug game so he could take over their business, and he knew Marcus’s weakness was women, so he collabed with Angel/Shay to trick Marcus out of his spot. The reason Marcus’s brother set him up was because he thought Marcus slept with his wife the night before their wedding. His wife told him that they never slept together and Marcus dropped her off at a hotel because she couldn’t get in touch with him, or something like that. (They showed what really happened in a flashback. The brother was drunk and getting danced on by strippers and Marcus left the party early to make sure his wife was safe. Basically being a brother to his brother.)

So Angel/Shay’s husband ends up getting killed by the brother and he gets 20 years in prison. Marcus becomes a “changed man,” and Red Locs has a new man. (When Marcus decided to marry Angel/Shay, Red Locs called him out for cheating which he didn’t exactly admit to, but she threatened to leave him and he basically told her ‘don’t let the door hit you on the way out.’ So she packed her bags and dipped.)

So here are my thoughts on everything because there are a lot of unanswered questions and I actually started reflecting on a few things.

First of all, was that Marcus’s son or not? Because they showed a flashback of what happened between him and Angel/Shay when they were teens? Or at least “younger” where she caught him in a room about to kiss another girl, and he wrapped his arm around the girl basically choosing her over Angel/Shay, and then the scene cuts to her rubbing her stomach. But right before her husband got killed, they were in the parking lot of the restaurant and her husband was talking about her birthing his son, and also, Marcus’s brother asked him if he got a DNA test right before the scheme was revealed at the restaurant. Not to mention the boy’s name was MJ (Marcus Jr.?) so who knows?

Also, why didn’t the brother clear the air with his wife before all of this? He had been holding this weird grudge for years based on an inaccurate assumption. And if he really felt like she cheated, why did he still marry her, and why was he still Marcus’s friend?! This really doesn’t make sense to me, but also, people really move like that in real life.

THEN, when they first reconnected, Angel/Shay made a comment about how it had been 10 years since they last saw each other, but it just seems like it was longer than 10 years. I guess it had to be 10 years for the son part, but these people were well established for them to just be 28. It seems like they should’ve been in their 30’s. But also, the predator-character that molested Marcus when he was a child was 38 when they announced his death on the news, so I guess it fits…

STOP READING IF YOU’RE TRIGGERED BY CSA.

Yeah, it came out in a couple flashbacks that Marcus was sexually assaulted as a child. He had just moved to the neighborhood and happened to pass by a house where two boys were playing catch (with a football) and he stopped when they spoke to him. Long story short, the two boys tell him he’s gonna get bullied at his new school unless he joins their club. Little Marcus innocently asks “what do I have to do?” The two boys take him in the house to meet their older, teenaged/young-adult brother and Marcus asks him “what do I have to do?” At which point, the older brother takes him to some room off-camera, and the two boys sit on the couch and dap each other up. Then the older brother walks out zipping up his pants and Marcus comes out and sits between the two boys with his face buried in his hands. And the boys just look happy about setting him up. This was depressing to learn, and it was broken up into two flashbacks, but still. I was infuriated.

This all came up because apparently, the dude that molested him was homeless and Marcus and his homebody that was also part of his business ran into him and he asked them for food, but then he recognized Marcus and Marcus remembered who he was and whooped his ass. He had blood on his shirt after the fact and his homeboy took him home and he cried in the shower where Red Locs came to console him. He didn’t tell her why he was crying or anything, but she saw the bloody shirt after he threw it on the bed. Later, Marcus’s brother kills the molester off principle and that’s how he ended up on the news.

Marcus did end up telling Angel/Shay what happened to him, and he had a complete psychological break. It was crushing to see because the crux of it all was his statement, “why did he have to touch me?!” or something to that effect. So Angel/Shay asked him if he thought he was gay, and Marcus said that he’s only ever been attracted to women. But that was actually an important question for several reasons (which I’ll get to in a sec). I think that moment was the reason why Angel/Shay wanted to back out of the scheme because she told Marcus’s brother that she felt bad because she felt like Marcus changed.

Overall, I think it was an important movie because it hits on two prominent themes: forgiveness and karma.

Forgiveness might’ve been the biggest theme between the two because as much as revenge sounds nice, sometimes, the bad people in our lives really do change for the better. So essentially, you’re punishing them for a past version of themselves when they likely already regret what they did and might even make moves to make it right. (Disclaimer: this is not universal; some people never change and they deserve whatever revenge plot that comes against them.) Also, if you’re gonna get revenge, you should probably make sure the person is actually guilty of what you’re accusing them of. A conversation could’ve been had, and none of that B.S. scheme would’ve happened.

As for karma? Well, the predator clearly got what he deserved: homeless and then murdered. (I just don’t feel sorry for him.) Just imagine having to ask your victim for food. You’re already in a messed up spot, and then you get your ass whooped and lose your life days later.

I don’t know if Marcus got what he deserved. In a round-about way, he kinda did because he was such a womanizer that he didn’t even realize he was being played. At the end, he asked Angel/Shay if she ever really loved him (oh, the irony!) and she didn’t even answer. THEN, he had the audacity to ask Red Locs for another go, but she had a new man already and moved on, and looked happier. Much happier. He lost Bad B because he broke up with her to marry Angel/Shay, and she slapped him. They didn’t show her anymore after that. So yeah, he basically lost all of his women.

But there was a note at the end where Marcus opens the floor to discuss molestation among Black boys/men because it traumatizes them in a way that makes them hurt the women in their lives as they get older. I forgot what the whole note said, but that was the gist of it.

So yeah, on that piece, it does prompt for some very necessary dialogue and it really got me to thinkin’ ‘cause we say all the time that the reason why Black men abuse Black women is because they’re fighting their sexuality. If they’ve been molested, that just might be the (other) reason why. Now in some cases, some Black men really are on the DL, but in others, it could be confusion or frustration because they don’t know how to address what happened or cope with their sexual trauma, and they never went to therapy to sort it out.

That’s why I believe Angel/Shay asked an important question because if his trauma is skewing his sense of sexuality, he probably didn’t know what he was and that’s what made him angry; that internalized anger made him “promiscuously toxic.” By her asking him if he thought he was gay, he was able to label his sexual orientation; saying it out loud probably affirmed who he was and that’s when his healing began. I don’t think it’s far off to assume that, because of homophobia, cis-hetero Black men are very sensitive about being called “gay.” When they’re molested by a man as a young boy, when they inherently like girls, it can bring confusion in the sense that… Well… It’s almost like wondering, “am I gay now?” Feelings of shame are already part of the trauma, but confusion about your sexual orientation adds another layer, especially when being homosexual carried a deep stigma in Black America once upon a time. Then, if they’re truly not gay, that’s a whole’nother violation.

The prognosis is seemingly promiscuity. I’ll probably write a separate post about this topic, but with some Black men, they have to sleep with multiple women to “prove” that they’re not gay. But are they proving it to society or to themselves?

There’s a lot to unpack here, but all in all, Promiscuously Toxic is a movie worth checking out.

Tubi is the GOAT! 🐐