Totally Killer

4 outta 5

Totally Killer is definitely a unique film, considering there aren’t a huge amount of slasher/ comedy/ horror time/ travel movies. The influence of Back to the Future is readily apparent because the main character keeps mentioning it, along with slasher standards like Scream and Halloween. The winning performance by the lead makes the absurdity even funnier. Sometimes the gore can be a bit heavy instead of whimsically messy like it should be in most horror comedies, so the tone can bobble abruptly. Also, the way that time travel is introduced into the story is downright clunky. Overall, this is a very quippy and wacky bloody slasher comedy that keeps things zipping along.

Jamie (Kiernan Shipka) is a modern-day teen in a sleepy town that is known for a series of grisly murders that took place on Halloween in 1987 by a killer dubbed the Sweet 16 Killer. Her mother, Pam (Julie Bowen), lost three of her friends that night and for all of Jamie’s life she has been preparing her daughter to be alert. Meanwhile, Jamie’s best friend, Amelia (Kelcey Mawema), has been building a time machine in an abandoned amusement park but can’t get it to work. When Jamie’s mom is murdered, she is pursued by the Sweet 16 Killer and time travel machine activates, sending Jamie back to 1987. There she meets her mom as a mean girl teenager (Olivia Holt) along with a trio of her mom’s friends who are destined to meet their end at the hands of the Sweet 16 Killer. Armed with knowledge of the future, Jamie tracks down her friend’s mom, Lauren (Troy Leigh-Anne Johnson) who started building the time machine in the 1980s. But Jamie can’t blend in with 1980s society and no matter what she does, the Sweet 16 Killer is on the loose, and Jamie can’t find a way back home.

Introducing time travel is always a tricky element but here it’s just straight up awkward and low effort. Jamie is just casually chatting with her friend working on a rickety old photobooth and says something like, “So, you still can’t get the time machine to work, huh?” That’s it, the movie just drops a time machine bomb right into the middle of the story with no setup. The similarly comic horror toned Freaky used a magic knife and lightning, and Army of Darkness has magic books, this goes with a time machine. Nothing too creative, time machines just exist.

The time travel rules in the movie are wobbly but fun. When Jamie actively changes the past, such as a rock musician becomes an emo acoustic singer in the present, the characters in 2023 just say it’s fine. Any time they remember something differently, they chalk up any difference in memory due to the “Mandela effect” where people incorrectly remember what happened. It’s a neat twist in a time travel story to see the effects happening concurrently in the present-day narrative. When Lauren asks Jamie if she knows anything about quantum mechanics, she says “I saw Endgame but didn’t really get it.” In 1987, Jamie often uses Back to the Future as a frame of reference to other characters, some of them get it, some haven’t seen it.

The culture clash bits of Jamie in the 1980s is a consistent source of yuks. Just about anything that’s normalized in the ‘80s shocks her. When she first arrives at the high school in the 1980s, she goes to the office and lies that she’s an exchange student from Canada the secretary simply sends her off to class. Jamie remarks the secretary isn’t going to ask for any other proof the secretary says “What is this? Fort Knox?” When Jamie is pushed out of a party she yells “Unwanted touch!” and the jock responds, “Unwanted person!”

Shipka is consistently funny in the film, like how she reacts to how everyone keeps doing dumb horror movie mistakes like going to a secluded cabin “in the middle of %$%$ing nowhere!” and the f-bomb that Shipka drops is amazing. Her parents got together after college but due to Jamie’s time travelling shenanigans they may hook up in high school, so she keeps trying to keep them apart to ensure her existence. Holt as the teenage version of her mom is fantastically mean, which makes for a good shock compared to how caring Bowen’s adult version of Pam is. Mawema as Amelia, the present-day friend of Jamie, gets to work on time machines nonchalantly and there’s some good twists that happen in the present. As the ‘80s teenage version of Amelia’s mom, Johnson is amusingly nonplussed at Jamie’s revelation that she’s from the future, saying simply that if one is working on a time machine, one would logically assume that visitors from the future would be possible.

The movie’s bloody factor is sometimes a bit too intense, like the scene when Pam dies in the present is visceral and not funny. The tap dance of violence to laughs can sometimes be difficult in horror comedy, and Totally Killer works best when it’s quips are flying. There are a few satisfying twists along to the killer’s identity reveal, and when the movie is poking fun at how insensitive 1980s culture could be with some good slasher moments, it’s a wildly enjoyable romp.