Main cast: Amanda Fix (Amy), Matthew MacCaull (Keith), Brenna Llewellyn (Savannah), Richard Harmon (Vern), Alexander Calvert (Deputy White), Elyse Levesque (Kathleen), Josh Zaharia (Jeffrey), Ben Sullivan (Billy), and Kevin McNulty (Neville)
Directors: Tesh Guttikonda and Mitch Oliver
Lowlifes is a pretty amusing slasher thriller that plays on the audience’s own inbuilt prejudices and assumptions about rustic folks. It takes the whole city folks versus hillbillies in the great nowhere trope and turns these assumptions and prejudices around.
We have a family from Calabash that is composed of the usual stereotypes: a dad Keith that is determined to force everyone to pretend that they are so thrilled to be here, the mom that pops anxiety pills like they are candies because she does whatever her husband wants even if it means getting high as a means to force herself to, the asshole son Jeffrey, and the rebellious daughter Amy that really DGAF and doesn’t bother to pretend otherwise.
They are all traveling in an RV belonging to Keith’s late father, because getting cooped up in close proximity is always the best way to bring surly family members together.
Predictably, they soon encounter two local men that look exactly like one would expect them to—these poor rustic folks are still paying for the sins of Deliverance—but ah, if one listens to their dialogues instead of immediately assuming the worst, they will realize that maybe things aren’t what they seem…
And things aren’t, they definitely aren’t, as this one quickly brings forth the twist in around the tenth minute mark of this movie: the family is made up of cannibals that prowl hillbilly county once a year to look for… treats, let’s just say. Can the hillbillies catch on in time and stop them?
The cast members elevate this one considerably, as Matthew MacCaull plays his character like a megalomaniacal preacher that perceives his yearly cannibalism getaway as something benign compared to lesbianism and antidepressants.
Keith gaslights the wife—in every sense of the word, not in the way people on social media misuse that word—and tries to mold less restrained Jeffrey to be more like him while he has no idea what to do with the rebellious daughter. Keith is the menacing yet menacing villain around which every other less interesting character orbit around.
The movie however has a tone issue. Think the original The Chain Saw Massacre and the sequel: the former is a straightforward slasher with satirical elements involving class and economic divide in society, while the latter is a polarizing film because it goes all out with camp and buffoonery that perplex fans of the former. This one adopts an approach that is in the middle ground of those two, and the result, sadly, is a film that is never too camp to be absurd but at the same time, its occasional dips into melodrama and camp clash with the tone of the rest of the film and creates a tonal whiplash.
It is also an odd case of a movie that tries to subvert expectations when one knows their tropes, while at the same time also staying true to what a trope-aware audience member expects.
I know, I know, let me try to explain this better. It is easy to catch on quickly that this movie has a gameplan: take a trope, twist it around. However, there have been at the same time so many “subvert expectations” films in these two decades that the whole subversion thing has become a trope as well. Hence, once one is familiar with how films subvert expectations, this movie becomes familiar and even predictable. Sure, it subverts some tropes… by replacing these tropes with a different kind but recognizable set of tropes.
Hence, I can see the “twist” ending coming from a mile away!
Lowlifes is not a great movie, as it doesn’t push itself hard or far enough to get out of the “Okay… but I feel like I’ve already seen variations of this movie already a few times” zone. However, this is an entertaining watch, as I’ve said. It’s well acted and well-structured enough to be engaging and intriguing even when the main twist is revealed very early, and this is thanks to the cast members, especially Matthew MacCaull, valiantly carrying the movie to the finish line on a high note. It’s worth a peek, therefore.
