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By John Serba
Published March 18, 2026, 10:00 p.m. ET
A viral TikTok meme becomes a feature-length movie in Terri Jo: Missionary in Miami, a Tubi original that brings a next-gen dude-in-drag comedy off an app and to, well, a different app. In 2022, comedian Kelon Campbell, better known as Psyiconic, put on a wig, dress and cross necklace and created Terri Joe, a character spoofing racist, homophobic White Southern women who are really super into Jesus. A few million followers later and Terri Joe gets her own movie, which we worry might suffer from Saturday Night Live syndrome, where the transition from short-form comedy to long-form feature tends to be problematic.
TERRI JO: MISSIONARY IN MIAMI: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: I’m struggling slightly with the conceit here: Coleman is a large Black man in drag playing Terri Joe, who looks in the mirror and sees a petite blonde White girl. But what do the other characters see? A White girl or a Black man? Terri Joe’s mom (Elizabeth D’Onofrio, brother of Vincent) is White, so that might or might not be a clue; for a minute, I concluded that her identity depends on what joke Coleman wants to deliver, but that might not be quite true. A couple things to know about her character: She loves to eat greasy food by the bucketful, she makes jokes to Latinos about calling immigration on them, she tells gay male drag queens, “I’m a real woman.” Crudity of all kinds just spills out of her. When she gets her hair done, the stylist mentions “kinks and curls,” and others comment on her, shall we say, bountiful carriage. Perhaps it’s easy for others to suss out the truth of Terri Joe, and I’m willing to take ownership of my intellectual density. But it feels like more work than it needs to be.
I digress. The plot: Terri Joe wakes up by slapping the dildo on her alarm clock. She steps on the scale and it reads ERROR. Then she falls down the stairs. Comedy desperation level: high. And it’ll fly right off the charts soon. Terri Joe goes to work at the Chitlin Corner and gets held up by four yokels led by Beau (Chase Garland), a handsome hunk of a redneck with a Confederate flag painted on the bed of his pickemup truck. She takes one look at Beau and the drool spills out of her horny repressed Christian maw. After an argument, Mama kicks Terri Joe out of the house, so she goes to Miami to stay with her cousin Jeorgia (also Coleman). Meanwhile, Beau and his dipshits follow her, tracking her on Fakebook (please laugh!), hoping to kill her before she IDs them to the cops.
From there, Terri Joe’s vacation becomes a series of episodes: Terri Joe does drugs. Terri Joe has sex with a man with her on top, which made me think the guy saw her as female, although I guess isn’t necessarily limited to the usual hetero domain. Terri Joe tries to find a church so she can do the praying and the kneeling and the other religious whatnot – but Terri Joe ends up hanging out with Latinos at a barbecue. And crashing into a drag queen with a motorcycle. And visiting a hairdresser (Jasmine Hurt). And running down the sidewalk trying to find a restroom before she dukes her panties. Etc. Will she survive all this crap and shit? Probably. The more relevant question is whether any of it is actually funny.
Photo: TubiWhat Movies Will It Remind You Of? Missionary in Miami is essentially Madea (or Big Momma) being hassled by Joe Dirt with hopes of being the next The Klumps. But it ultimately has more in common with Norbit.
Performance Worth Watching: Hurt and Rolin Alexis (as a recurring drag queen character) show a proclivity for comic timing that this movie doesn’t deserve.
Sex And Skin: A couple instances of non-nude raunchiness.
Our Take: Welp. Terri Joe’s transition from short-form comedy to long-form feature tends to be problematic. As ever, what’s funny for two minutes is tough to sustain for 80. Coleman and director Dale S. Lewis’ attempt to stretch the sketch results in a collection of loosely strung-together unjokes that land with thud after thud after thud. I’m all for satirizing stereotypes via un-P.C. comedy, but the movie’s array of mullets, sneering depictions of piety and fried chicken gags are leaden and obvious, buffered by moronic slapstick, a wearisome drug-trip sequence and other decrepit and wheezy attempts to inspire laughs.
Meanwhile, Terri Joe pigs out a lot and pulls down her gigantic panties so she can take even more gigantic dumps, which is perhaps a reminder that prissy White Christian ladies’ shit stinks too. Or maybe it’s just a dumb, far-too-easy joke. Nobody’s watching Missionary to Miami for sophistication – or anything resembling an actual movie, as it’s shot in such a flat, bright manner that it blends right in with the commercials Tubi wedges in between episodes. But you can count the number of fresh, clever bits on one hand, and it’s OK if you use the appendage that lost a few digits in a fireworks mishap.
Any attempt to analyze the nature of Terri Joe’s delusion/the concept of the character is like buttering up a rhinoceros and trying to shove it in the toaster oven. The application of logic to nonsense is the work of a fool. I learned that the hard way as I leaned in and tried to make sense of the movie’s non-ending, which is a confusion of was-it-all-just-a-dream drivel and a frustrating cliffhanger. I concluded that others see her as a Black man in a dress, and her Caucasian mother is part of her delusion. I’m gonna just go with that – probably into a sequel that’s all but promised in the final shot, lawd help us all.
Our Call: And why is it called Missionary in Miami when Terri Joe goes cowgirl on the guy? SMDH. SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance film critic from Grand Rapids, Michigan. Werner Herzog hugged him once.
English (US)