Bullet Points: Lowlife
It’s amazing sometimes how we find ourselves watching a movie for one reason or another and learning that it is for completely different reasons that we end up loving it. I had no other reason to watch Lowlife except for that I saw it had a dude on the cover with a luchador mask on and the current state of professional wrestling has reminded me that it is filled with lowlifes. It felt like the right time.
Synopsis: The sordid lives of an addict, an ex-con, and a luchador collide when an organ harvesting caper goes very, very wrong.
- Fake ICE: The film opens with an ICE Agent making a move on a hotel with a family of immigrants staying in it. You can see pretty early on that this dude isn’t on the up and up and certainly isn’t doing the work of a real ICE agent. He abducts the family and takes them to Teddy Oso’s place to harvest the organs and sell the young women into sex slavery. It’s a pretty grim start.
- Teddy and the Monster: Teddy Oso has a taco place and he also does all sorts of terrible shit to people. Working for him is a former luchador (who still wears his mask) named El Monstruo. He is the muscle and gopher for Teddy’s business.
- Four-part Saga: Lowlife is delivered to us in four parts the same way that movies by Tarantino and his buddies have always done. I’m sure director Ryan Prows is a big fan and whether the movie was written in this format or not, I think the format works for the film instead of just linear storytelling. The four sections are called Monsters, Fiends, Thugs, and Criminals. You may have noticed that none of them are positive titles…
- El Monstruo: All of the characters have various levels of backstory but El Monstruo is layered like an onion with issues and eccentricities. He works for and totally respects Teddy for helping him out of some trouble when his wrestling career took a turn for the worst (that’s what happens when you kill someone in the ring) and he’s willing to do most anything for the man. That, of course, will get tested when that something means El Monstruo will have to confront the demons of his own family legacy.
- More characters: The plot takes us back to the hotel several times and we eventually learn enough about the desk clerk/owner to know that she has a rough life and needs a serious vacation. Nicki Micheaux plays Crystal, who is more involved in this whole mess than we originally thought but I couldn’t get over how amazing Nicki’s performance was here. Another shoutout goes to Jon Oswald who went from voicing characters in children’s shows and Power Rangers to having a swastika tattooed on his face.
- Phantasm of Holy Justice: El Monstruo, Teddy, and the rest of the crew find themselves back at the hotel for what appears to be the final showdown. Bullets fly, blood gushes, and I just want to see this luchador beat the tits off of someone!
- The real showdown: Wow! The finale in the basement hell that we met earlier is absolute madness. El Monstruo finally lives up to his name and makes a decision about his legacy that he couldn’t/wouldn’t have made earlier in the film. Teddy finally gets what is coming to him and old swastika face finds himself a new role. It’s a pretty wild finish to a fantastic film.
The Verdict: Lowlife was a surprisingly excellent movie. It weaves several tales of various degrees of grime, violence, and downright depths of human waste into a beautiful tapestry that will keep you truly engaged. The actors and director Ryan Prows should be showered with praise for this fantastic film that I only watched because of the luchador mask on the cover. If only Lucha Libre was more popular in the States, this film would be a massive hit. Some might see it as a smaller version of Pulp Fiction and that isn’t too far off. A more accurate description than that might be that Lowlife is the low budget, 96 minute movie that Tarantino wishes he could make. Go out of your way to find it and let me know when you do.
