Film Review: Lowlife

A motel owner, a luchador, and a dude with a swastika tattoo on his face walk into a taco shack.

It sounds like the start of a joke, but that is a moment that actually happens in Lowlife, the feature length debut from director, Ryan Prows, who also co-wrote the film with Tim Cairo, Jake Gibson, Shaye Ogbonna, and Maxwell Michael Towson. One of the things that will pop into your head as you watch this is how much it feels like a Pulp Fiction riff. However, I found myself reminded, not of Pulp Fiction necessarily, but of the many Pulp Fiction knockoffs that flooded the American indie scene in the mid-to-late 90s. Films like 2 Days in the Valley, Things to Do in Denver When You’re Dead, or American Strays. Though, that might actually make Lowlife out to seem far worse than it is. I wouldn’t even go as far as to call it a bad film. It’s a solid film, an interesting film, a passionate film, an engaging film, and one that is aspiring to be far more challenging than those it reminded me of.

The film may evoke the 90s, in terms of style, but its feeling is very much of the here and now. It opens with armed man in an ICE uniform busting a motel door and taking in a Mexican family away to, what looks like a taco shack, but contains a basement where there seems to be an underage prostitution ring going on. The officer is revealed to be a corrupt agent Fowler (Jose Rosete), who works for Teddy ‘Bear’ Haynes (Mark Burnham), who uses the taco place as a cover for his operations, which also includes organ harvesting. It does set a rather grim, and unpleasant mood, but it’s done for the sake of establishing the stakes because this is the point where the film really reveals itself.

After the opening we are given three, nonlinear segments, introducing the main players, and how they become connected, either through coincidence, mistakes, or just plain bad luck. The first of which is about El Monstruo (Ricardo Adam Zarate), a luchador who never takes off his mask, a man obsessed with maintaining the legacy of his father while dealing with the insecurity of not being as big of a man that his father was, and I mean “big” in a very literal way here. He hopes his soon-to-be-born son will continue the same legacy and be the bigger man he could never be.

Then there’s Crystal (Nicki Micheaux), the owner of the motel from the opening sequence. Her husband, Dan (King Orba), is in desperate need of a kidney, and she has turned to Teddy, who has found the perfect match in Kaylee (Santana Dempsey), who just happens to be the woman bearing El Monstruo’s child.

The final segment follows Keith (Shaye Ogbonna), who picks up his friend, Randy (Jon Oswald), from prison. Randy is the guy with the tattoo, by the way. The two catch up, but it soon becomes clear that Keith needs his friend’s help in another one of their old schemes. However, the scheme involves Teddy, whose power is apparently completely unknown to Keith, which leads the two in a situation they didn’t plan on.

From there, the plot threads connect in ways that are unexpected, violent, or unexpectedly violent. Most of the joy comes out of seeing the characters bounce off each other, and the results can be both humorous and thoughtful. Sometimes the plot mechanics get a bit clunky, the budget limitations become obvious, and as much as the film tries, I don’t think it reaches a very cohesive, much less profound, point aside of vague notions of finding the humanity in one another despite appearances.

However, that’s not to say Lowlife feels like a waste because there’s never a point where I was bored, and I found myself wondering where the characters will go in their journey. I don’t think the film is a total success, but it’s a film that plays with ideas that are big, relevant, and it really swings for the fences. While the overt nastiness of some of the subject matter, and gruesomeness of the violence will definitely limit it’s appeal to a more niche, genre crowd, it’s exactly the kind of crowd that might eat this up and give it a cult status. I’m at a point where I don’t immediately find Tarantino knockoffs inherently obnoxious because it’s really best for filmmakers to get that out of their system early so they can move on, and hone their craft. There’s a lot of interesting and audacious things going on in Lowlife, and it’s made with serious panache. I eagerly await to see what other weird ideas Ryan Prows would like to explore in the future.