Directors – Tesh Guttikonda & Mitch Oliver, Screenplay – Al Kaplan, Producer – Charles Cooper, Photography – Matt Young, Music – Jordan Andrew, Visual Effects Supervisor – Vishwas Kapoor, Special Effects Supervisor – Geoff Ingeberg, Production Design – Ames Lynch. Production Company – Lowlifes Production Inc.
Cast
Amanda Fix (Amy), Matthew McCaull (Keith), Brenna Llewellyn (Savannah), Elyse Levesque (Kathleen), Josh Zaharia (Jeffrey), Cassandra Sawtell (Juli Ann), Richard Harmon (Vern), Kevin McNulty (Neville), Ben Sullivan (Billy), Alexander Calvert (Deputy White), Dayleigh Nelson (Big Mac)
Plot
Keith, his wife Kathleen and two teenage children Amy and Jeffrey are driving through the back country in their RV when they come across two hicks, Vern and Billy, who act in a threatening manner. The two claim to have a breakdown and Keith agrees to give Billy a lift home. However, soon after they set out, Keith and the others turn on Billy and kill him. They are in fact a family of cannibals roving the area in search of prey. They travel on to Billy’s home where they claim they have had a breakdown. They are invited to dinner and then to stay the night but prepare to slaughter the entire family.
The Backwoods Brutality genre was popular in the 1970s with films such as Deliverance (1972), The Last House on the Left (1972), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974) and The Hills Have Eyes (1977), among others, all featuring backwoods hicks murderously attacking innocents from the city. It made a revival in the mid-2000s with remakes of most of the above, along with a number of new and original works. (For a more detailed listing see Backwoods Brutality).
At least, Lowlifes sets out letting us think it is going to be a Backwoods Brutality film. There’s the family who are average and normal to the point of being dull driving through the backroads in an RV who come across Richard Harmon and Ben Sullivan. Harmon and Sullivan play the two uncouth backwoods hicks to the point of cliched exaggeration – menacingly wielding a shotgun across the shoulder and crudely suggesting that they should follow daughter Amanda Fix inside the RV. Sullivan’s performance here is so caricatured he all but breaks out into hee-haws.
About fifteen minutes in, Lowlifes introduces its main twist. Now I am unable to discuss any more about the film without referring to this twist so PLOT SPOILERS ALERT henceforth. The family agree to drive Ben Sullivan back home and as they do so the tables are abruptly reversed. Where we initially believed we were dealing with menacing backwoods hicks, this is turned on its head and it abruptly revealed that the family are actually a group of roving cannibals who travel around the countryside and kill the titular lowlifes as meat. (Although my suspicion is that people who lead a rugged outdoorsy lifestyle would not make for very tender cuts of meat – although not having tasted human flesh, what do I know?).
A regular family – (l to r) Amanda Fix, Josh Zaharia, Elyse Levesque and Matthew McCaull(l to r) Backwoods hicks Ben Sullivan and Richard Harmon
Lowlifes falls apart at that point. It is such a blatantly skewed case of misdirection that it lacks any basic plausibility. And the film seems to not know what to do after springing its twist. The rest of the film is just skulking around the family home as the cannibal family eliminate the hick family. The film’s sympathies seem all over the place – it wants us to like the cannibal family at the outset and makes the hicks so loathsome it is hard to have any sympathy for them once the twist is introduced.
Most of the latter scenes regard the two hick girls as sympathetic and it seems as though the film is wavering as to whether Amanda Fix and Brenna Llewellyn are going to realise a lesbian attraction – but this in itself is another gigantic cliché, replete with lines like “I’d rather eat pussy than people” – where it becomes hard to sympathise with Amanda when one minute she is kissing and the next pulling a knife on Breanna.
Lowlifes was a directorial debut for Tesh Guttikonda & Mitch Oliver. Elsewhere, Guttikonda has written the comedy Summerland (2020) and the quite good social media psycho-thriller Influencer (2022).
